# Patrick Esser

> Patrick Esser is a German AI researcher and co-founder of Black Forest Labs. His work with Robin Rombach and collaborators on VQGAN and latent diffusion helped make high-quality image generation practical; he later worked on Stable Diffusion and Runway’s Gen-1 before helping launch the FLUX model family.

- **Role:** Co-founder, Black Forest Labs
- **Organizations:** Black Forest Labs, Runway, CompVis, Heidelberg University, Stability AI
- **Nationality:** German
- **Education:** Heidelberg University
- **Known for:** Co-authored the VQGAN paper on high-resolution image synthesis., Co-authored the latent diffusion paper that underpins Stable Diffusion., Led authorship of the 2024 rectified flow transformer paper associated with Stable Diffusion 3.

## Career timeline

- **2020** — Co-authored Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis (VQGAN) with Robin Rombach and Björn Ommer.
- **2021** — Co-authored High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models.
- **2022** — Worked as a principal research scientist at Runway on the research and model behind Stable Diffusion.
- **2023** — Co-authored Runway’s Gen-1 video synthesis research.
- **2024** — Led authorship of research on rectified flow transformers and co-founded Black Forest Labs, which launched FLUX.1 in August.
- **2025** — Black Forest Labs released FLUX.1 Kontext and FLUX.2, and announced a $300 million Series B.

## Achievements

- Co-authored the VQGAN paper on high-resolution image synthesis.
- Co-authored the latent diffusion paper that underpins Stable Diffusion.
- Led authorship of the 2024 rectified flow transformer paper associated with Stable Diffusion 3.
- Co-authored Runway’s Gen-1 video synthesis work.
- Co-founded Black Forest Labs and helped bring the FLUX model family to market.

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Black Forest Labs introduced FLUX.1 Kontext for image generation and editing.
- **2025-11** — Black Forest Labs launched FLUX.2 with multi-reference image generation and editing.
- **2025-12** — Black Forest Labs announced a $300 million Series B to fund visual intelligence research.

## Links

- Twitter/X: https://x.com/pess_r
- GitHub: https://github.com/pesser

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/patrick-esser
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29