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Robin Rombach

Co-founder & CEO, Black Forest Labs

Search every verified Robin Rombach interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Robin Rombach, co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs, appeared on the Tell Your Story podcast in September 2026, where he discussed his path from studying physics to building an AI startup headquartered in Freiburg. He said he initially considered studying music before choosing physics, and he described his fascination with foundational science and deep learning. Rombach noted that his company develops AI models trained on multiple data types, including images, video, audio, and text, with the goal of better understanding and simulating reality, and he mentioned applications such as video description, podcast transcription, text assistance, and coding agents. Rombach also addressed the company's growth and location, stating that while Black Forest Labs is based in Freiburg, it remains closely connected to Silicon Valley, and he framed this as a matter of multiple perspectives rather than an either-or choice. He discussed founding the startup in 2024 and said that beyond technological challenges, entrepreneurship involves broader personal motivations. He expressed pleasure when people tell him his work inspired them to start their own ventures, adding that he values taking action over complaining.

Recent appearances

  • From Physicist to AI Billion-Dollar Startup | Robin Rombach on the Tell Your Story Podcast

    October 12, 2026 · 📺 Lexware and Christian Steiger

    In this episode, Christian Steiger talks with Robin Rombach, co-founder of Black Forest Labs, about artificial intelligence, the creation of Stable Diffusion, and building a globally successful AI startup from Freiburg. Robin was about to study music, then chose physics and discovered his passion for deep learning and generative AI during his studies. Together with his later co-founders, he developed foundational technologies for AI image generation before founding Black Forest Labs in 2024. Today, the company's AI technology is used by Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft, among others. But ho…

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  • Robin Rombach über Robotergehirne, verhandeln mit Musk und Frust über die deutsche Selbstaufgabe

    July 23, 2026 · 📺 Handelsblatt

    Black Forest Labs (BFL) ist eines der wertvollsten KI-Start-ups in Deutschland. Der Bildgenerator der Freiburger Firma erzeugt fast fotorealistische Bilder. Damit ist das Team um CEO Robin Rombach auf dem Gebiet einer der stärksten Konkurrenten von Google. Warum das wichtig ist? Für BFL ist das nur der erste Schritt zu einer „visuellen Intelligenz“, die die Welt wirklich versteht. Was das heißen soll, zeigt ein ganz neues Modell, das die Firma gerade vorgestellt hat: Es soll wie ein Robotergehirn funktionieren. Damit lernen die Maschinen sozusagen sehen – und autonom auf ihre Umwelt zu reagie…

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  • AMD, Starcloud, Coatue..10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

    July 18, 2026 · 📺 Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

    Day 1 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the most high-profile AI summit in Europe. We pulled 10 of the sharpest founders, operators, and investors aside for their hottest takes on the debates defining AI right now. Open source vs closed models dominated the room, alongside agents rewriting how work gets done, the death of the keyboard and mouse, the economics of inference, and physical AI moving from data centers into cars, devices, and even orbit. Real numbers, real disagreements, and a few pieces of breaking news, straight from the people building it. "The keyboard and mouse are slowly dying." - M…

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  • Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese’s AI Toolkit with CEOs of Cerebras & Black Forest Labs

    July 09, 2026 · 📺 All-In Podcast

    (0:00) The AI Buildout: Data Centers Bigger Than Cities (Andrew Feldman) (1:50) Reasoning, Inference, and Breaking Moore's Law (16:28) Open Source, AI Sovereignty, and the Road to AGI (40:54) The Innovation Behind Generative Video (Robin Rombach) (47:31) Martin Scorsese, Robots, and the Future of Hollywood IP Thanks to our partners for making this possible! AppLovin Ads - AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaches over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollar…

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  • The OpenRouter Show ft. Robin Rombach - Episode 3 (Black Forest Labs)

    January 13, 2026 · 📺 OpenRouter

    The OpenRouter Show Episode 3: Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 Image Models This episode of the OpenRouter show features special guest Robin Rombach, CEO and Co-Founder of Black Forest Labs, who comes on to talk about their new FLUX.2 models. Join our hosts Tomas and Shashank as we talk through some product updates, including the launch of Broadcasts for all your LLM Observability needs, and the beta of Anthropic API Compatibility in OpenRouter, supporting Claude Code and other platforms. 📢 Major Announcements: • Broadcasts - https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/fea... • Anthropic API + Claude Code…

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  • Why new AI darling Black Forest Labs is betting on Europe

    December 08, 2025 · 📺 CNBC International Live

    Black Forest Labs says it intends to accelerate its research and development after securing a Series B funding round of $300 million, giving the German AI image generation start-up a valuation of $3.25 billion. CNBC's Silvia Amaro speaks to Robin Rombach, CEO at Black Forest Labs.

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  • AI of the Hurricane | Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) & Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs)

    November 26, 2025 · 📺 Slush

    As AI continues to evolve at lightning speed, two of its leading minds come together for an open, cross-interview conversation on where the technology is truly headed. Thomas Wolf (Co-founder & CSO of Hugging Face) and Robin Rombach (Co-founder & CEO of Black Forest Labs) explore the breakthroughs shaping the next wave of AI innovation and what they mean for founders, investors, and builders across the global startup ecosystem. — Slush is the most founder-focused event on Earth, delivering actionable company-building advice while bringing together the who’s who in startups and tech. Slush…

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  • TUM AI Lecture Series - FLUX: Flow Matching for Content Creation at Scale (Robin Rombach)

    February 17, 2025 · 📺 Matthias Niessner

    Abstract: I will talk about the foundations of flow matching, scaling them for large-scale text-to-image pretraining, preference-tuning approaches and techniques such as model distillation that allow to serve these models efficiently at scale. In addition, I will talk a bit about conducting research in a startup context.

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  • Robin Rombach: Co-founder @Black Forest Labs, Building Leading AI Models From Europe | Slush 2024

    November 27, 2024 · 📺 Slush

    As the continent faces challenges in keeping pace with global leaders in the development of AI, what does it take to build a generational technology champion out of Europe? Robin Rombach, co-founder of Black Forest Labs, joins Alexandre Momeni from General Catalyst to explore how Europe’s approach to frontier AI is transforming generative media and setting new standards for enterprise AI adoption. With insights into open-source’s pivotal role and strategies for upskilling the workforce, they’ll discuss how European innovation is empowering businesses worldwide to harness AI’s transformative p…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →