The paper that changed the internet's pictures was written by research assistants.
In April 2022 Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser, working under the professor Björn Ommer at LMU Munich, published a method for generating images. It became the foundation of Stable Diffusion. By the end of that year the tool had been downloaded by millions, and the company that carried the name, Stability AI, was the one that got the credit.
The first cheque was US$31m, from Andreessen Horowitz and a handful of prominent individuals, among them Brendan Iribe, Michael Ovitz and Garry Tan.
The three had gone to work there. Then they left. In 2024 they founded Black Forest Labs in Freiburg, in the Black Forest, with seven others. They chose a small German town over Silicon Valley, and the name made the point.
The first cheque was US$31m, from Andreessen Horowitz and a handful of prominent individuals, among them Brendan Iribe, Michael Ovitz and Garry Tan. In August 2024 they released Flux.1. It scored above DALL-E 3 and Midjourney on a popular rating system in mid-2024, came in versions developers could use, and showed up inside xAI's Grok chatbot within weeks. Mistral's Le Chat added Flux in November.
What almost nobody saw coming was the break. In December 2024 xAI moved to its own model, Aurora, and Musk's company ended the cooperation. The founders were praised for refusing to work with it again. They had other customers. Nvidia partnered in January 2025, Adobe put Flux.1 Kontext inside Photoshop in September 2025, and Flux.2 followed in November.
In December 2025 a US$300m round led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP valued the company at US$3.25bn. Total funding passed US$450m. By mid-2026 it had about 100 employees, with 30 in San Francisco, and called itself first of all a research lab. In June 2026 Martin Scorsese joined as an adviser, a choice that drew pushback from the Art Directors Guild.
The cost is a cloud that has never fully lifted. The founders do not disclose what the models were trained on. Ars Technica suspected scraped internet images; the founders told an interviewer they did not use the LAION set but would not list their sources. Critics also worry about how real the pictures look. And in a field that moves by the month, one benchmark in August 2026 put Flux 2 only fifteenth of 148.
For a first-time founder the story is a quiet one. Credit and ownership are different things, and the people who write the method can still build the company after someone else has carried the name.