Black Forest Labs Secures $300M Funding at $3.25B Valuation

Black Forest Labs, a German AI image-generating startup, has announced securing $300 million at a valuation of $3.25 billion. This marks as one of the largest investments in a Europe-based AI startup in the current year. The investment was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), with the participation of several other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Temasek Holdings, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures.

The company, founded in 2024, has its headquarters in Freiburg, Germany, and also operates a lab in San Francisco. Black Forest Labs is recognized for its Flux foundation models of AI generation, which are popular on Hugging Face. Notably, companies like Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft utilize its models.

Moreover, the startup has gained attention for its models' capability to not only generate images but also edit them. The European AI sector has seen an increase in investment, with $5.2 billion invested in Q3, up from $2 billion in the same quarter last year.

However, this amount still remains significantly lower than the $35.7 billion invested in North American AI startups in Q3. Mistral AI, a Paris-based generative AI startup, also announced a Series C round of approximately $2 billion, making it the largest-ever venture round raised by a European AI company according to Crunchbase data.

Despite these substantial fundraises, Europe's largest generative AI startups are valued notably lower than their U.S. counterparts. For instance, San Francisco-based Anthropic is valued at $183 billion, and OpenAI recently completed a secondary share sale amounting to $6.6 billion, giving it a $500 billion valuation.