i'm an outsider but none of the startups mentioned above ever came to my ears. Mistral suddenly popped after openai/anthropic exploded, and they were rapidly described as the 3rd contender, with emphasis on technical merit. Maybe i was fooled though.

Black Forest Labs are the makers of FLUX, which for a while was the best open image model available (and generally a pretty strong image model). That said, now with a wave of Chinese models and the advent of autoregressive image models, I'm not sure how much that will stay true.