Martin Scorsese backs Black Forest Labs after $300 million raise

Martin Scorsese’s decision to back Black Forest Labs marks a new test for Hollywood’s uneasy truce with generative AI. The company, which raised $300 million in a Series B at a $3.25 billion post-money valuation, is leaning on the director’s name to argue that image generation can serve filmmakers without replacing them.

Black Forest Labs said the company was founded in 2024 by former Stability AI researchers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz, and is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, with an office in San Francisco. It created FLUX, its leading image-generation model, and says the fresh capital will accelerate research and development as it works toward models that unify visual perception, generation, memory and reasoning. The round drew a long list of backers, including a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures.

Scorsese’s involvement is being framed as advisory rather than a wholesale embrace of AI filmmaking. The company says he used FLUX during preproduction to move storyboards more quickly among his production designer, art designer and cinematographer, saving time while preserving craft. Scorsese has also pointed to tools he has already used in film, including 3D on Hugo and de-aging technology on The Irishman, and has said cinema is only about 125 years old, so filmmakers should remain open to how the medium evolves. Black Forest Labs says he has stressed keeping human taste, values and judgment at the center.

That distinction matters in Hollywood, where the fight over generative AI has been driven by copyright concerns, labor anxiety and the fear that studios will use new tools to cheapen authorship. Black Forest Labs’ FLUX image tools previously drew controversy over the generation of copyrighted characters, a reminder that every new technical leap now lands in a dispute over ownership, consent and control. Scorsese’s endorsement does not settle those fights, but it does signal that elite creative resistance is no longer absolute.

The company is also using adoption metrics to bolster its case. Black Forest Labs says its open models are the most popular image models on Hugging Face, while its enterprise models are used on Fal.ai, Replicate and TogetherAI. For studios and unions preparing their next bargaining rounds, the larger question is whether this becomes an isolated high-end endorsement or the start of a broader shift, where selective AI adoption enters mainstream production under tighter rules around labor, attribution and creative authority.