By Maxwell Zeff
Publication Date: 2026-04-09 18:00:00
Standing inside At the HumanX conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, it’s hard not to feel like you’re at the center of the AI universe. Technology leaders swarm the building, and the headquarters of OpenAI and Anthropic are just a block away. But a 70-person startup headquartered 5,000 miles away in Germany’s Black Forest — a region famous for its ham — has become a top competitor to Silicon Valley’s leading labs for generating AI images.
In December, Black Forest Labs raised $3.25 billion in funding after signing deals to provide AI image generation capabilities in Adobe and graphic design platform Canva. It even has agreements with major AI labs like Microsoft, Meta and xAI to provide similar features in their products.
Almost two years after launching, Black Forest Labs can afford to be selective about how they collaborate. In 2024, Elon Musk’s xAI used Black Forest Labs to power Grok’s first image generator. This partnership brought Black Forest Labs to the…
