On Wednesday (June 17), the company announced in a blog post its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner. It’s a full-body ultrasound device that produces a complete body image in roughly 60 seconds without radiation or magnetic fields.
A new division, Midjourney Medical, will build the device, which is positioned as a faster, lower-cost alternative to MRI.
The scanner works by lowering a person on a platform into a shallow pool of water ringed with half a million ultrasonic sensors. Soundwaves fire through the body from every angle, generating terabytes of data per second. A compute cluster reconstructs the waves into 3D cross-sectional images of muscle, fat, bone and organs, a method Midjourney called Ultrasonic CT.
“No such device has ever been built until now,” Midjourney CEO David Holz said at an announcement event in San Francisco, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The market Midjourney is entering is dominated by Siemens Healthineers, GE Healthcare and Philips. MRI costs vary from $400 to $12,000, according to BuzzRx. Most require a physician referral, hospital infrastructure and a 30- to 60-minute procedure. Holz is betting those friction points can be addressed at a lower cost and outside a clinical setting.
Butterfly Network Powers the Scanner in a $74 Million Deal
The hardware runs on technology licensed from Butterfly Network, a publicly traded semiconductor ultrasound company with a market capitalization of roughly $1.5 billion.
Butterfly disclosed the terms of its co-development agreement with Midjourney in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Nov. 17, detailing up to $74 million in expected payments over five years. The prototype incorporates 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules. Future generations are expected to use substantially more, according to a Thursday (June 18) press release.
Butterfly Network CEO Joseph DeVivo said in the release that his company’s collaboration with Midjourney “represents a potentially meaningful commercial opportunity for Butterfly.”
Holz framed the scanner’s first deployment around a consumer wellness destination where scans are a byproduct of the visit, per the Bloomberg report. The Midjourney Spa, planned for a 25,000-square-foot space in San Francisco, will include hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and a gym. Holz said the company has signed a lease and already has the designs.
The spa is expected to open by the end of 2027, according to the blog post.
The scanner is one of eight projects Midjourney is working on, split between four hardware and four software initiatives, Bloomberg reported. Holz said the company aims to ship at least two hardware products in the near term.
The long-term target is a fleet of 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031 with capacity for 1 billion scans per month. A second-generation design using fully custom silicon is targeted for 2028, the blog post said.
How a Self-Funded AI Company Pivoted Into Medical Hardware
Before Wednesday’s announcement, Midjourney was known primarily as a generative AI image and video subscription service with prices from $10 to $120 per month, Bloomberg reported.
The company has no outside investors and described itself in the blog post as a community-backed research lab.
Holz’s background includes co-founding Leap Motion, where he served as chief technology officer, according to Society for Science.
Ahmad Abbas, a former hardware engineering manager for Apple’s Vision Pro, leads Midjourney’s hardware division.
Midjourney Scanner Lacks FDA Clearance but Has a Path to Diagnostics
The scanner is not cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for diagnostic use. Midjourney will start by providing body composition maps, which do not require regulatory clearance, and plans to layer on FDA approvals incrementally, according to the blog post.
“We’re not even using any AI in this yet,” Holz said, per the Bloomberg report.
About a dozen people have been scanned to date, The Verge reported Wednesday.
Midjourney has a waitlist for the San Francisco spa and is recruiting volunteers for upcoming clinical trials through its website.
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