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Northzone Backs Generative AI Startup Black Forest Labs in Push for 'Visual Intelligence'

Northzone, the European venture capital firm, has invested in Black Forest Labs, a German startup developing advanced generative AI models for creating images and video.

The investment underscores growing investor appetite for companies that are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence, particularly in areas like computer vision and media creation. Black Forest Labs, founded by a team of top AI researchers, is aiming to become a leading independent lab for "visual intelligence" - the ability of AI systems to understand, generate and manipulate visual content.

"We believe these generative image and video models are becoming part of the infrastructure of the internet: the layer that will power how brands communicate, products are presented, films are made, and how consumers express themselves creatively," Northzone said in a statement announcing the investment.

Black Forest Labs was co-founded by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser, who previously worked in top university AI labs. Their research on techniques like "latent diffusion" and "stable diffusion" has been widely cited and built upon by other AI researchers and companies.

At Black Forest Labs, the trio is aiming to commercialize their work and push the boundaries of what's possible with generative AI for visual media. The startup, based in Freiburg, Germany with additional teams in San Francisco and London, is working on a suite of models under the "FLUX" brand.

Financial terms of Northzone's investment were not disclosed, but industry sources familiar with the deal said it was in the tens of millions of dollars, valuing Black Forest Labs in the hundreds of millions. That would make it one of the larger venture rounds for a European generative AI startup to date.

The investment comes as large tech companies and venture capitalists race to back startups working on the next generation of AI tools. Generative AI, which can create original text, images, audio and video, is seen as a particularly promising and fast-moving area.

Northzone, which has backed companies like Spotify, Klarna and Kahoot, said Black Forest Labs' focus on open research and collaboration aligned with its own investment thesis.

"Their ambition is straightforward and bold: to be the lab that defines the future of visual intelligence," the firm said.