Midjourney is an independent artificial-intelligence research lab best known for its text-to-image generation service of the same name. It was founded in 2021 by David Holz, who serves as chief executive and who previously co-founded the motion-sensing company Leap Motion. The lab is based in San Francisco and has remained privately held and self-funded, without institutional venture capital, a position it has cited as distinguishing it from venture-backed competitors (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/ai-startup-midjourney-pivots-to-health-with-ultrasound-machine).
The image service launched in open beta in July 2022 and was initially operated through the Discord chat platform, with users generating images by issuing prompts to a bot. It became one of the most widely used generative-image tools and a reference point in debates over AI and creative work, alongside services such as OpenAI's DALL·E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion.
Business and scale
Midjourney is unusual among frontier-adjacent AI firms in operating profitably on subscription revenue without outside funding, with a small headcount relative to its reach. Public figures are partial and come largely from litigation and press reporting. A copyright complaint filed by Disney and NBCUniversal in June 2025 stated that Midjourney earned roughly $300 million in 2024 and was preparing a video product (Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo). The company subsequently released image-to-video capabilities. Reporting tied to its June 2026 healthcare announcement referenced revenue in the range of several hundred million dollars (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/ai-startup-midjourney-pivots-to-health-with-ultrasound-machine).
Copyright litigation
Midjourney has been a defendant in several of the copyright disputes that have followed generative-image tools, on the theory that training on copyrighted images without license infringes the rights of the works' owners. It was among the defendants in the artist class action Andersen v. Stability AI. In June 2025, Disney and NBCUniversal filed a federal copyright-infringement suit against Midjourney, alleging the service reproduced their protected characters; the complaint sought damages or statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work (Source: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-nbcuniversal-studio-lawsuit-ai-midjourney-copyright-infringement-1236428188/). The suits place Midjourney within the broader set of AI Content Licensing and training-data copyright questions, and connect it to the policy debates around the CREATOR Act and the NO FAKES Act (federal, proposed).
In the studio suit — described in July 2026 accounts as brought by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. — Midjourney asked a federal judge in the Central District of California to overturn a magistrate judge's June 16, 2026 order limiting its AI-use disclosure obligations, per accounts published July 2, 2026 (Source: jdsupra.com; letsdatascience.com). The consolidated case is tracked at Disney v. Midjourney (consolidated studio copyright suits).
Move into medical imaging
In June 2026, Midjourney announced its first hardware product and a move into healthcare: a full-body scanner that the company described as using ultrasound rather than the ionizing radiation of CT or the magnetic fields of MRI. CEO David Holz presented the device — reported under names including the "Midjourney Scanner" and an "Ultrasonic CT" — as able to perform an imaging scan in roughly sixty seconds in a spa-style setting, with the stated aim of making imaging more accessible than conventional MRI (Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-ai-company-wants-to-replace-mris-with-a-60-second-dip-in-the-spa-can-that-really-work-3bce6681). On June 19, 2026 the company said it was committing more than $74 million to launch the whole-body ultrasound screening business (Source: radiologybusiness.com). A June 18, 2026 account reported the device as claiming sub-millimeter, MRI-comparable imaging in an eventual 60 seconds, while the current prototype takes about 20 minutes and had scanned roughly a dozen people; the device holds no FDA clearance and relies on a licensing deal with Butterfly Network worth up to $74 million (Source: linkedin.com). Commentary framed the move as a bet on proprietary imaging data as much as on the device itself, since a large medical-imaging dataset would have value for training (Source: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/midjourneys-move-medicine-bet-data-094032795.html). Independent verification of the device's clinical performance was not available at announcement, and the claims of MRI-comparable quality were presented as the company's own. The announcement makes Midjourney an early example of a consumer generative-AI firm positioning itself as a deployer in Healthcare — AI Deployment.
Relationships
- deploys-in: Healthcare — AI Deployment (June 2026 medical-imaging hardware announcement).
- related: AI Content Licensing, CREATOR Act, NO FAKES Act (federal, proposed), OpenAI, Stability AI.
- regulated-by: copyright litigation — Disney / NBCUniversal suit (June 2025); Andersen v. Stability AI.