AI Developer Black Forest Labs Aims to Raise $300 Million at a $3.25 Billion Valuation

• The round will be led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP.
• The company develops AI-based image generators.
• The startup cooperates with Meta, Adobe and xAI.

German AI-developer Black Forest Labs is in talks to raise $200 to $300 million in investments at the company’s valuation of $3.25 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing sources familiar with the deal.

The round is planned to be led by venture capital players Salesforce Ventures and AMP. The latter is a new investment fund managed by Andreessen Horowitz partner Anjni Midha.

Negotiations are ongoing and terms could still change, experts say. Representatives for the AI company and Salesforce Ventures declined to comment, and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.

Black Forest Labs is among the European companies building its own generative AI models, along with France’s Mistral AI. The startup is based in Freiburg, in southern Germany. It was founded by researchers involved in the development of Stable Diffusion, one of the first systems to make image generation mainstream.

According to Bloomberg, the company previously signed a contract worth more than $100 million with Meta Platforms, giving the social network the right to use its image generation solutions. Black Forest Labs has also partnered with Adobe to help integrate AI drawing features into the company’s products.

The startup’s technology is also used in the Grok project developed by entrepreneur Elon Musk’s team. This solution provides AI models with visual generation capabilities.

Black Forest Labs has already raised $31 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in August 2024. Now, according to sources, the startup has approached the status of one of the largest European players in the field of generative AI.