Flux

Black Forest Labs is a generative AI company founded in 2024 by researchers who previously worked on Stable Diffusion and latent diffusion models, including Robin Rombach. The company focuses on state-of-the-art image (and increasingly video) generation models under the FLUX brand.

Black Forest Labs pursues a dual-license model that combines open-weight distribution with commercial monetization. It releases open weights for developers and researchers while offering a hosted API and enterprise commercial licenses, alongside large platform partnerships.

FLUX models generate high-quality, photorealistic images with strong prompt following and text rendering. The lineup spans fast 'schnell' variants, high-quality 'dev' models, 'pro'/'max' tiers via API, and editing and control-oriented models, with newer FLUX.2 releases adding flexible megapixel-based generation and editing.

The open-weight models can be downloaded from Hugging Face and run in tooling such as ComfyUI, or accessed through hosting partners like Replicate, fal.ai, and Together AI. FLUX also powers image features in third-party products, including Freepik and xAI's Grok.

FLUX serves developers, startups, enterprises, and researchers who need controllable, high-quality image generation they can embed via API or self-host on their own infrastructure for privacy, cost, or customization reasons.

Black Forest Labs raised a seed round reported around $31 million in 2024. In December 2025 it raised a $300 million Series B at a roughly $3.25 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz partner Anjney Midha (AMP), with participation from a16z, NVIDIA, General Catalyst, and Temasek. Total funds raised are reported to exceed $450 million. The company also has commercial partnerships, including a reported large agreement with Meta.