Investing in Black Forest Labs

Visual AI has a supply chain problem. 

While raw image and video generation is progressing rapidly, these base models are the first mile of the AI value chain. To unlock their greatest potential, these models need the world’s most talented product and engineering teams to build delightful, simple, and tailored workflows and end-user experiences — the last mile — without needing to become experts in generative modeling research. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce our seed investment in Black Forest Labs (BFL), a team that’s on a mission to build the world’s best open visual models for developers. BFL is addressing this need by focusing exclusively on the first mile, freeing up developers and product engineers to focus on the last mile. 

BFL is led by Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann — the original co-creators of the Stable Diffusion series of models that revolutionized open source image generation. Their work on latent diffusion models formed the foundation for Stable Diffusion and influenced core architectural elements of models like DALL-E 2 and 3, and Sora. Today, Stable Diffusion forms the backbone of the open source image generation community. On Hugging Face, 9 out of the 10 most downloaded text-to-image models are based on derivatives of Stable Diffusion.

Critically, BFL is committed to continuing the open weights approach that made Stable Diffusion so impactful, while building a sustainable business focused on developers. While they plan to offer paid API access and custom enterprise solutions, they will release core models with permissive licenses. This strategy has several key advantages:

1. It enables a wider range of applications and use cases to be explored by the community.
2. It allows for greater transparency and collaborative improvement of the models.
3. It builds trust and increases reliability by allowing external researchers to analyze the models for potential biases or issues.

Generative visual models have the potential to revolutionize industries from entertainment and education to product design and scientific visualization. By making powerful base models more accessible to developers and researchers, BFL could accelerate innovation across a wide range of fields.

We’re thrilled to partner with Robin, Patrick, Andreas, and the entire BFL team on this journey. Their commitment to open source, technical excellence, and fostering a collaborative AI ecosystem aligns perfectly with our vision for the future of artificial intelligence.

We can’t wait to see what the community builds with Black Forest Labs’ models! You can read more about the founding team, their mission, and their newly released state-of-the-art models on their website.