While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models

Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources

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2024-10-07 20:30:02

While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models can still open doors, and checkbooks. Multiple sources tell us that Black Forest Labs — a startup that’s building generative AI image models and came out of stealth two months ago with $31 million in funding — is closing new funding. A $100 million round at a $1 billion valuation is the amount we are hearing. The deal may not be final and so could still be subject to change.

Black Forest is not just any AI startup: The company was co-founded by the engineers who built the technology behind Stability AI. And it has a big-name customer. Elon Musk’s X.ai is using Black Forest’s Flux.1 text-to-image model to power image generation in its Grok chatbot. That’s a service that set people chattering immediately after it was launched in part because of the audacious results people generated with it.

The company is also catching the eye of investors because of its founders and founding team. They include Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser, Dominik Lorenz and CEO Robin Rombach, researchers who created Stability AI, considered a game-changing platform for image generation.