Following its transformation into a creative studio, LimeWire acquires BlueWillow, a formidable rival to Midjourney

LimeWire, once infamous for music piracy, has made an unexpected pivot into the world of content creation. The company recently announced its acquisition of BlueWillow, a popular generative AI image creation platform that competes with services like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. This move follows LimeWire's diversification into content creation after initially planning to build an NFT marketplace for music creators. BlueWillow, founded earlier this year, has become the second-largest AI image generating community on Discord with 2.5 million members and over 500 million images created.

LimeWire plans to integrate BlueWillow's functionality into its website, offering it as part of its paid and advertising-based free service tiers for creators. Additionally, LimeWire intends to expand its media services with BlueWillow as the foundation. While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, it does not include BlueWillow's talent, who will eventually leave to work on a new AI venture. LimeWire has raised approximately $17.5 million through token sales and is now focusing on content creation as its core business.

The acquisition allows LimeWire to offer its own image generation tools and expand into video and audio generation. LimeWire's user base will also grow significantly with the addition of BlueWillow's 2.5 million Discord members. LimeWire plans to develop subscription features and tools for creatives to expand its services further.

BlueWillow, founded by Ritankar Das, was built as a bootstrapped effort with a focus on creating user-friendly generative AI tools for image generation. Das stated that his primary goal was to make generative AI tools easy to use for a broad range of users, and BlueWillow's customizations and improvements catered to different user needs.

LimeWire's acquisition of BlueWillow reflects its ongoing efforts to grow its community of users and revenues and expand its services in the content creation space.