PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Robin Rombach

Robin Rombach coauthored the 2022 CVPR paper on latent diffusion models and then helped lead the original Stable Diffusion V1 release. Before co-founding Black Forest Labs in March 2024, he spent two years as research lead at Stability AI in London. As of October 2026, he is chief executive of the Freiburg company, which released its first FLUX model in August 2024. His coauthored paper Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis received a Best Paper award at ICML 2024.

Works
33

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2013–2020

    Physics study in Heidelberg

    He studies physics at Heidelberg from 2013 to 2020, where he discovers his interest in AI-generated images.

  2. 2022

    Latent diffusion models

    He coauthors High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models, a paper published in the CVPR 2022 proceedings.

  3. 2022

    Stable Diffusion V1 release

    He and Patrick Esser lead the original Stable Diffusion V1 release, a text-to-image model released in 2022.

  4. March 2024

    Co-founding Black Forest Labs

    After two years as research lead at Stability AI in London, he co-founds Black Forest Labs with Andreas Blattmann and eight other researchers in March 2024.

  5. 2024

    A Best Paper award at ICML

    His coauthored paper Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis receives a Best Paper award at ICML 2024.

  6. August 2024

    Releasing the FLUX model

    Black Forest Labs releases FLUX, its first own text-to-image model, in August 2024.

  7. December 2025

    A $300M Series B round

    The company he co-founded raises $300M in a Series B round at a $3.25B valuation in December 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    Chief executive at Black Forest Labs

    In March 2026, he is CEO of Black Forest Labs in Freiburg, the company he co-founded.

Sources and credits

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  1. Standortbotschafter März: Robin Rombach, CEO Black Forest Labs, Freiburg - IHK Südlicher Oberrhein ihk.de. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. CVPR 2022 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Stable Diffusion 2.0 Release — Stability AI stability.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Stable Diffusion - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Black Forest Labs: $300 Million Series B At $3.25 Billion Valuation Raised To Advance Frontier Visual Intelligence pulse2.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Black Forest Labs raises $300M at $3.25B valuation | TechCrunch techcrunch.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Flux (text-to-image model) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.