Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs (BFL) is a German artificial-intelligence lab headquartered in Freiburg im Breisgau that describes itself as a “frontier AI lab.” The company builds visual intelligence — models that understand, reason and act in the world — and offers the FLUX family of generative models via an API. BFL was founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach (CEO), Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser — former Stability AI employees who had previously researched image generation at LMU Munich (co-creators of Stable Diffusion). Its technology is based on rectified-flow transformers scaled to 12 billion parameters. Key products include the FLUX.1 family (Schnell/Dev/Pro, 2024), FLUX.1 Tools, FLUX.1 Kontext (2025), FLUX.2 (2025) and a generative video model under development (used, among others, by mimic robotics in its FLUX-mimic model). The company raised a ~$31M round led by Andreessen Horowitz and employs about 70 people (2026).