Black Forest Labs
The German lab behind the FLUX image models, used inside Photoshop, Canva and Picsart.
Black Forest Labs is a German AI company founded in August 2024 in Freiburg im Breisgau, with a second office in San Francisco. It builds the FLUX family of models for generating and editing images and video.
The founding team are the researchers who created latent diffusion, the technique behind Stable Diffusion, and who left Stability AI in early 2024. Their models power generative features inside Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Picsart and Mistral’s assistant, which makes the company far more influential than its size suggests: it employs around a hundred people.
Its business model is unusual and deliberate. Some FLUX models are released as open-weight models, free to download and run, while the strongest versions stay behind a paid interface. The open versions build a developer community, the closed ones and large platform contracts bring in the money. The company was valued at 3.25 billion dollars in December 2025.