A strange cowboy is arriving in the Wild West of generative AI. Last year, LimeWire, once notorious for music piracy and shut down by the music industry, moved into content creation under new owners. It acquired BlueWillow, a popular generative AI image creation platform that competes with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, today to expand that.

Despite being founded earlier this year, BlueWillow took off due to rising interest in generative AI, Discord becoming a popular platform for creatives to use these tools, and its free main version. With 2.5 million members and 500 million+ images created, BlueWillow claims to be Discord’s second-largest AI image-generating community (Midjourney is first).

The plan is to keep BlueWillow on Discord and integrate its functionality into LimeWire’s website’s paid and advertising-based free creator service tiers. LiveWire will use it to launch more media services.

Financial terms are unknown, but BlueWillow talent will not be acquired. Ritankar Das, the company’s founder and CEO, said in an interview that the BlueWillow team is advising LimeWire on the platform during a transitional period, but they plan to leave en masse to work on a stealth AI venture.

The deal shows LimeWire’s commitment to growing its user base and revenue. The startup raised $17.5 million through token sales from Arrington Capital (run by Mike Arrington, the founder and former editor of this site), Kraken, Crypto.com Capital, CMCC Global, Hivemind, Deadmau5, and others to build an NFT marketplace for music creators in its relaunch. Early this year, sources estimated its value at $60 million.

LiveWire founders Paul and Julian Zehetmayr have diversified into building a platform to create and distribute content, with NFTs now “more of a sideline” rather than LimeWire’s core business.

LimeWire’s core business needed more tools. We hired engineers to build subscription and other features for creatives, but we used third-party integrations for AI-based image generation. LimeWire acquired BlueWillow to offer its own image generation tools and expand to video and audio generation.

Besides expanding that tech stack, BlueWillow will add users: Julian Zehetmayr told an interviewer that LiveWire has “thousands” of smaller creators in its long tail and 100 “bigger creators” on its platform.

And like Midjourney, BlueWillow was bootstrapped and funded by the founder. Das is a wunderkind who graduated from Berkeley at 18 with a double degree in bioengineering and chemical biology in three years, then studied at Oxford and Cambridge and founded a health tech startup that CirrusDx acquired in 2022.

Das started BlueWillow to learn how generative AI tools worked and could be built, not to make money.

He said, “What we saw was that a lot of people were developing generative AI models for images,” and he wanted to join the tech “Cambrian explosion”. However, Das and his team found that there were dozens of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the market, and using them together would speed up the process of building the basic service and let engineers focus on improving user interfaces and other front-end features to make using BlueWillow easier.

“Making it really easy for users” became the main goal, and BlueWillow built its own “weights” and customizations to improve image making depending on what it was used to illustrate and for whom. «Architects and advertisers require different looks and feels, so we built for each.»

Long-term, Das and his team didn’t want to scale and build the next phase of BlueWillow because compute power is expensive. There were no immediate plans to raise money, so when LimeWire called, it seemed easy to sell.