Germany-based BlackForest Labs has recently emerged from stealth mode, securing $31 million in seed funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to a press release. Other notable investors include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. The startup’s co-founders, Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann, were previously researchers involved in developing Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models.
According to Artificial Analysis, BlackForest Labs’ FLUX.1 models have surpassed the quality of Midjourney and OpenAI’s image generators, as ranked by users in their image arena. The company is committed to making its models widely accessible, offering open-source AI image generation tools on Hugging Face and GitHub. It also plans to develop a text-to-video model in the near future.
Company profile on CRUNCHBASE.