European AI startup Black Forest raises 432 billion won... following Mistral, emerges as a 'new strong contender'.

Source: TokenPost Original Title: European AI startup Black Forest raises 432 billion won… following Mistral, emerging as a 'new powerhouse'. Original Link: German AI image generation startup Black Forest Labs has raised a new fund of $300 million(, approximately 432 billion won), achieving a valuation of $3.25 billion(, or about 4.68 trillion won). This is considered the largest scale investment related to artificial intelligence( AI) made in Europe this year, and it is evaluated as a major deal that injects vitality into the European AI ecosystem, which has been somewhat neglected in the capital flow centered in the United States.

The latest investment round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP, with significant participation from prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA(NVDA), Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures. Black Forest Labs has successfully raised a total of $450 million(, approximately 648 billion won), within just one year of its founding.

Black Forest is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and operates an AI laboratory in San Francisco, USA. The company is known for its series of AI models specialized in image generation, 'Flux(Flux)'. In particular, this model has become one of the most widely used image generation tools on the open-source platform Hugging Face(. It is reported that global big tech companies such as Adobe)ADBE(, Meta)META(, Microsoft)MSFT(, and Canva are building their services based on this model.

The noteworthy point is that beyond simple image generation capabilities, the Flux model also supports image editing functions, meeting various content creation demands. This level of technological capability is assessed to have secured competitiveness compared to leading companies in the United States and China in terms of commercial utilization.

Overall, the AI startup ecosystem in Europe is still lagging behind the United States and China. However, the emergence of rising powers like Black Forest is leading to an increased presence in the market. According to Crunchbase, as of the third quarter of 2025, the amount invested in European AI startups is $5.2 billion), approximately 7.48 trillion won(, which is more than double the $2 billion), about 2.88 trillion won(, from the same period last year. However, this still shows a significant gap when compared to the total of $35.7 billion), approximately 51.4 trillion won(, attracted by North American AI companies in the same quarter.

Meanwhile, with this investment, Black Forest has emerged as one of the largest generative AI companies in Europe, following Paris-based Mistral AI. Mistral raised about $2 billion), approximately 2.88 trillion won( in its Series C funding last September, breaking the European AI investment record. Following that, the UK-based infrastructure company Enscale raised $1.1 billion), about 1.58 trillion won(, and the autonomous driving software developer Wave raised $1.08 billion), approximately 1.55 trillion won(, each demonstrating the growth of the European AI market.

Nonetheless, the market capitalization of European AI companies still has a large gap compared to their American counterparts. Anthropic in San Francisco is currently valued at $183 billion), approximately 263 trillion won(, and OpenAI is valued at $500 billion), approximately 720 trillion won(, indicating that there are many barriers to overcome for the European AI market to grow to a global level.

The rapid growth of Black Forest serves as a clear example showcasing the potential of AI in Europe and is expected to act as an important variable in gauging the future expansion of technology investments within Europe.