creators

Robin Rombach - Black Forest Labs co-founder and CEO

Robin Rombach leads Black Forest Labs, the Freiburg lab behind the FLUX models, and was first author of the latent diffusion paper behind Stable Diffusion.

Robin Rombach is a German AI researcher and the co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs. He studied physics at Heidelberg University from 2013 to 2020, then began a PhD in the university's computer vision group; in 2021 he moved with the group to LMU Munich, where he worked alongside Bjoern Ommer. Rombach was first author of "High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models," posted to arXiv in December 2021 and published at CVPR 2022 with Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser and Ommer. It introduced latent diffusion, which runs the diffusion process in a compressed latent space rather than in pixel space and so cuts the cost of generating high-quality images; the method became the basis of Stable Diffusion. He was at Stability AI before leaving to start his own lab. Black Forest Labs was announced on 1 August 2024, alongside its first FLUX.1 models, by Rombach, Blattmann and Esser. It trades as BFL GmbH from Ingeborg-Krummer-Schroth-Strasse 18 in Freiburg im Breisgau and is entered in the commercial register at the Amtsgericht Muenchen under HRB 291820. By Rombach's own count in June 2026, it employs about 90 people across Germany and the United States. Its FLUX models are its main product; FLUX 3, a joint image, video and audio model, entered early access in July 2026.

Specialization

generative image models, video generation, diffusion models

Country

Germany