Black Forest Labs (BFL) is a frontier AI research lab founded in 2024 in Freiburg, Germany, by the pioneering researchers behind latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion. The company builds the FLUX family of multimodal foundation models for visual intelligence—covering image synthesis, video generation with native audio, and physical AI action prediction. Its flagship FLUX 3 model is jointly trained across image, video, audio, and robot control modalities in a single unified architecture, enabling everything from photorealistic image editing to 20-second HD video clips with synchronized sound.

BFL's technology powers creative workflows for millions of users and is deeply integrated into products from Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft. The company offers its models via a developer API, open-weight downloads on Hugging Face, and enterprise licensing. FLUX 3 Action, its open-weight 7B world action model, reached first place on the RoboLab robotics benchmark and has been deployed on Audi factory production lines through a partnership with mimic robotics.

Founded with a small team of around 10 co-founders, BFL has scaled to approximately 100 employees across its Freiburg HQ and a San Francisco office. Backed by tier-1 investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, and General Catalyst, the company raised $300M at a $3.25B valuation in its December 2025 Series B. Total disclosed funding exceeds $450M, making Black Forest Labs one of Europe's most highly valued AI startups.