The AI image company best known for generating dreamlike art from text prompts has announced its first hardware product — and it is not a camera, a headset, or anything in its image-generation wheelhouse. On Wednesday, Midjourney CEO David Holz took the stage at a San Francisco jazz club to unveil the Midjourney Scanner, a full-body ultrasonic imaging device, along with plans to open a flagship "Midjourney Spa" in Union Square by late 2027. The pivot is so jarring that even Holz acknowledged it: "The first hardware project we're releasing is a little different from the cat pictures we've been making."
What the Scanner Actually Does
The device works by having you step onto a platform that slowly lowers you into a shallow pool of water, passing your body through a ring of ultrasonic sensors at roughly two inches per second. According to Midjourney, the system uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per scanner, generating a full-body 3D map in roughly 60 seconds, with no radiation and no powerful magnets. Holz has claimed the resulting image quality is "in many ways superior to even MRI machines," a statement that clinicians and engineers have greeted with notable skepticism pending peer-reviewed data.
The technical foundation relies on a licensing deal signed in November 2025 with Butterfly Network, a medical ultrasound company with FDA-cleared handheld products. The five-year co-development agreement involves up to $74 million in expected payments to Butterfly, including a $15 million upfront fee and $10 million in annual license payments. The Midjourney partnership was significant enough that it drove Butterfly's stock up roughly 27 percent after the company's Q4 2025 earnings and contributed $6.8 million of Butterfly's record quarterly revenue, as reported by Business Wire.
Notably, as The Next Web pointed out, the scanner itself uses almost no generative AI — the technology that made Midjourney famous. "We're not even using any AI in this yet, just really cool hardware and software," Holz told Bloomberg. The AI component is limited to labeling and segmentation of scan results. The company's image-synthesis expertise, it turns out, has little to do with the device beyond Midjourney's appetite for massive compute.
The Spa Plan
The consumer rollout centers on a roughly 25,000-square-foot flagship space in Union Square, according to The Next Web. The facility is designed to pair 10 scanners with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and a gym — essentially positioning a full-body scan as something you might do after a cold plunge, not after getting a referral from your doctor. Midjourney's own announcement describes the spa as a place "you love going, whether it's by yourself or with friends," where "the scans are a side-effect." The Union Square location is slated to open at the end of 2027.
The concept draws on a broader tech-wellness convergence that has been bubbling in San Francisco for years, but this is a significant step beyond the city's existing biohacking boutiques and longevity clinics. Holz said he would personally use the scanner to track how his body responds to changes in diet and exercise, framing it as a routine consumer health ritual rather than a medical procedure. That framing is doing a lot of work. For the spa plan to function as described, Midjourney would need to open on schedule, maintain consistent scan quality across hundreds of daily sessions, and convince enough San Franciscans to willingly get into a pool and be scanned with technology that, as of today, has been used on roughly a dozen people.
The Numbers Need Context
Midjourney's stated ambitions are enormous. The company says it wants to deploy more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031 and perform a billion full-body scans a month, as reported by Startup Fortune. Holz has even claimed the scanner could eventually "avoid 30 percent of all deaths and 50 percent of all healthcare costs." These projections sit somewhere between moonshot and marketing copy, and the gap between them and the current prototype is hard to overstate.
The Gen 1 prototype shown at the event is, by Holz's own description, a "MacGyver version" built largely from off-the-shelf modules, and current scan times are around 20 minutes rather than the target 60 seconds, according to BigGo Finance. A Gen 2 device is planned for late 2026, and a Gen 3 built on custom silicon — at which point Butterfly's components would be replaced — is further out. The team working on Midjourney Medical currently numbers nine people. That team is being asked to build and validate novel medical hardware, navigate FDA approvals, and open a 25,000-square-foot Union Square spa, all while Midjourney simultaneously pushes forward on image and video generation amid a heavily contested competitive landscape.
Regulatory and Privacy Questions
For now, Midjourney Medical is sidestepping the FDA's most demanding requirements by positioning the scanner as a body composition tool rather than a diagnostic device. As R&D World noted, Holz said the company intends to layer on FDA approvals incrementally, starting with things that are easy and building toward diagnostic capabilities over time. But anything that crosses into clinical diagnosis triggers the FDA's full Software as a Medical Device framework and premarket review requirements. The path from "body composition map" to "MRI rival" runs directly through that regulatory gauntlet.
Data privacy is a legitimate concern that the company has not yet addressed in detail. A spa that routinely collects high-resolution 3D scans of your internal organs is generating an extraordinarily sensitive category of personal health information. California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act and the broader patchwork of state health privacy laws would likely apply, and storage, sharing, and secondary use of that imaging data will require clear answers before any serious regulatory or consumer scrutiny. Midjourney's existing privacy policy, written for an image-generation platform, was not designed with internal organ maps in mind.
The Baggage Midjourney Brings to This
The company arriving at Union Square with a medical scanner is also the company currently fighting consolidated copyright lawsuits from Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery in federal court in Los Angeles, with a discovery cutoff set for August 2026 and trial motions expected by late that year, according to court records on CourtListener. Warner Bros. called Midjourney "a bottomless pit of plagiarism" in its complaint. Midjourney is defending on fair use grounds, but the potential liability, if courts side with the studios, could reach into the billions. Holz has not said how the company would fund the scanner program if that litigation goes badly.
Midjourney is entirely self-funded, having reached an estimated $500 million in annual revenue without taking outside investment, as noted by Time. That financial independence has been a source of pride for Holz, who has positioned the company as a community-backed research lab rather than a VC-driven startup. It also means there is no institutional investor backstop if the scanner program burns cash, the lawsuits produce adverse rulings, or Union Square retail leasing turns out to be as expensive as it tends to be.
What to Make of It
The honest summary is that what Midjourney unveiled yesterday is a prototype, scanned on a dozen people, built by a nine-person team, with no FDA clearance, no published imaging data, and no disclosed pricing — packaged inside a spa concept slated to open on a street that has been struggling with foot traffic and vacancy for years. The hardware partner is credible, the physics of ultrasound tomography are real, and Holz has a track record of building things that sounded unlikely. None of that means the scanner will work as claimed at scale, get through the FDA on the timeline described, or that San Franciscans will line up to sink into a Union Square pool and get their organs mapped.
As The Next Web put it plainly: "The most accurate way to describe the Midjourney Scanner is an ambition with a launch event attached." The real verdict arrives when published imaging data and formal FDA submissions appear — not before.
