Meta has struck a partnership with Midjourney, licensing the image-generation startup’s “aesthetic technology” for use in its own future models and products. The deal, announced Friday in a post on Threads by Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, pairs a licensing agreement with a technical collaboration between the two companies’ research teams. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The pairing is an odd one on paper. Midjourney generates images and video from text prompts on a subscription model, and has stayed famously bootstrapped — no venture capital, no outside investors — since it started. Founder David Holz says the arrangement is a licensing deal, not an acquisition, and that his company remains independent. Wang, for his part, casts it as part of a strategy to build the best products by combining talent, compute, and partnerships with the strongest teams in the field.

For Meta, the move is a quiet admission: The partnership could help Meta develop products that compete with OpenAI’s Sora, Black Forest Lab’s Flux, and Google’s Veo. For Midjourney, Holz says the company remains independent and has no outside investors.