Monika Liechti

What Midjourney is: - No investors, fully community-funded research lab - Revenue from image generation product funds all R&D - ~$100M in first 9 months, $200M by month 12, still growing - 8 active projects: 4 hardware, 4 software ----2 hardware products coming to market soon (consumer-purchasable) ----2 are large-scale machines DAVID HOLZ: Background and Philosophy - Grew up in Florida, parents in medicine, dad had a dental office on a sailboat - Physics and math background: drawn to the tension between predicting reality vs. absolute truth - Core thesis: the interaction between humans and technology is the biggest limitation, not compute power - Founded Leap Motion at 22: $10M in pre-orders in 48 hours from a website (not Kickstarter) - Built hand-tracking VR: 600M-parameter mixture-of-experts model, 2015, CPU cluster, pre-TensorFlow - Also shipped Northstar, an open-source AR headset - Left Leap Motion wanting a “home,” not a 100x return - Mentor Bill Warner told him he could bootstrap; he listened this time - Started Midjourney with ~$200K, called Google for 10,000 GPUs on trust alone THE SCANNER: Full Body Ultrasonic CT - First new whole-body medical imaging modality in ~50 years - Concept: “as powerful as an MRI, as casual as a trip to the spa” - No radiation, no magnets, no x-rays; safe for unlimited scans How it works: - 40 rings, each with 8,960 transducers (200 microns wide), totaling 358,000 elements - Fires ultrasonic waves at 100M times/second; sound travels through water at 1,481 m/s - Sensors resolve motion down to picometers (sub-atomic range) - Captures 17 GB/second of raw data; 806 TB per full scan reconstruction - 21 on-site servers, 2 petaflops of compute - Patient lowers into water at 4 cm/second; ~60 seconds for several hundred body slices - Produces sub-millimeter 3D maps of internal tissue Already outperforming MRI in some tissue boundary and muscle fiber detail on DAY ONE. 10x cheaper and 60x faster than MRI machines; scan cost effectively near zero. Gen 2 scanner planned by end of 2026; Gen 3 will use custom silicon. SCANNER vs. MRI: Key Differences - MRI: 60-minute tube, loud, requires sedation for children, expensive, radiation-adjacent. - This scanner: water immersion, 30-60 seconds, no sedation, no radiation, repeatable daily. - Current limitation: not yet FDA-cleared beyond body composition; no AI layer yet applied. - Already better than MRI in certain muscle/fiber/vein boundary resolution at day one THE MIDJOURNEY SPA: - First location: Union Square, San Francisco - 25,000 sq ft, 4 floors - Amenities: hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, European spa features, gym - 9-10 full scanners on-site - Goal: open by end of 2027 Target: - 50,000 scanners globally, capable of 1 billion scans/month - 5,000 spa locations needed at ~10 scanners each - Estimated $20B capex to scale; Midjourney self-funds the first location - Payback period modeled at ~6 months per location ROADMAP & REGULATORY PATH: - FDA discussions already started; body composition on a clear path - Ascending approval ladder planned:Body composition (near-term, easy) - Sharing data with physicians - Doppler / blood flow imaging - Pregnancy / fetal imaging (ultrasound already approved; this is a natural extension) - Therapeutic applications (tendon/muscle healing, eventually incisionless surgery) AI not yet applied to imaging; planned as a layer once data volume grows LONG-TERM VISION: - Flag anomalies automatically, substitute some blood tests, enable daily health tracking PRICING: - No firm numbers yet; likely spa memberships plus walk-in and scan-only tiers; cost of scan itself is near zero - Data analysis: day one is body composition only; physician sharing gated on FDA progression - Form factors: current design is throughput-optimized (up/down elevator); bathtub and gym-sized variants possible later - Blood test substitution: sub-millimeter daily differentials with AI may eventually replace some tests; acknowledged as frontier science - Cancer destruction via focused ultrasound: technically possible, not on near-term roadmap NEXT STEPS: - Sign up for Midjourney Medical email list for research trial scan invitations - Visit midjourney.com/medical for jobs and updates (page now live) Gen 2 scanner presentation planned before end of 2026 More secret projects to be announced soon.