Meta teams up with Midjourney for AI image and video

David Holz has never accepted a cent from investors. The CEO of Midjourney built a $200 million-a-year empire selling $10-a-month subscriptions, keeping his brainchild completely independent. Until today.

Alexandr Wang, Meta's Chief AI Officer, announced that Meta will be able to use Midjourney 's technology in its products thanks to a licensing agreement. This isn't an acquisition; Holz remains independent. It's a rare position in 2025, almost romantic. But how long can it last? Is the partnership with Meta the first step towards something bigger?

1/ Today we're proud to announce a partnership with @midjourney , to license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions.

— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) August 22, 2025

The terms of the agreement are not public. We don't know how much Meta is paying or how long the partnership will last. But we do know that when a giant like Meta approaches, things change. Independence becomes relative.

Mark Zuckerberg is playing Monopoly with AI, and he's spared no expense. This year, he invested $14 billion in Scale AI, acquired the voice startup Play AI, and even talked to Elon Musk about joining his $97 billion bid to acquire OpenAI (Meta ultimately declined, and OpenAI declined).

The partnership with Midjourney is different. It's not about money; Midjourney doesn't need it. Meta gains access to the technology that created the most recognizable visual style in generative AI. Midjourney gets Meta's computational resources and distribution without selling its soul.

Founded in 2022, Midjourney did everything backwards. No venture capital, no swanky offices, no bombastic keynotes. Just a Discord bot and images that redefined what "AI-generated" means.

While OpenAI 's DALL-E focused on photorealism and Stable Diffusion on open source, Midjourney created a unique, dreamlike, and instantly recognizable style. Its images have invaded Instagram, Twitter, and even art galleries. In June 2025, they launched V1 , their first video model, directly competing with OpenAI's Sora.

With subscriptions ranging from $10 to $120 a month, they've built a business with $200 million in annual revenue. Without a cent of external funding.

Meta has Imagine for images and Movie Gen for videos . They're good products, integrated into Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. But they're not Midjourney. They don't have that magic, that style, that ability to create images that stop the scroll.

Meta's research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to integrate the technology into future models and products. Imagine automatically generated Instagram Stories in Midjourney style. Facebook Ads that create themselves with the perfect aesthetic. Custom WhatsApp stickers that look like works of art.

The Disney problem that looms over everything

But there's a catch: the lawsuits . Disney and Universal sued Midjourney two months ago, accusing it of training its models on copyrighted works. It's the same accusation facing Meta and virtually every other AI company. So far, the courts have ruled in favor of the tech companies.