Andreas Blattmann was a research assistant under the professor Björn Ommer at LMU Munich. In April 2022 he, Robin Rombach and Patrick Esser published the latent diffusion paper that led to Stable Diffusion.
The three went on to work at Stability AI and then left. In 2024 they founded Black Forest Labs in Freiburg in the Black Forest, with seven others. The first round was $31 million from Andreessen Horowitz and several individuals.
In August 2024 the company released Flux.1, which was used in xAI's Grok that month and in Mistral's Le Chat in November. xAI ended the Grok cooperation in December 2024. Flux.1 Kontext followed in May 2025 and Flux.2 in November 2025.
In December 2025 the company was valued at $3.25 billion post-money.