Midjourney Launches Medical Division and Full-Body Ultrasonic Scanner

Midjourney—the company best known for generating AI art from text prompts—announced a full-body ultrasonic scanner on June 18, pivoting into medical imaging hardware with a product it claims is the first new whole-body scanning method in 50 years.

The Midjourney Scanner works by lowering a person on a platform into a shallow pool of water ringed by more than 358,000 ultrasonic transducers arranged in 40 chip modules within a 70cm ring. Sound waves fire through the body simultaneously from every angle, generating roughly 17 gigabytes of data per second. The resulting scan produces detailed visualizations of muscles, fat, bones, and organs at approximately 0.5mm resolution—with no radiation and no magnetic fields.

Company founder David Holz described the technology in terms borrowed from nature: "like being surrounded by half a million tiny dolphins from every angle," using echolocation principles applied at medical scale.

The current prototype takes about 20 minutes to complete a full-body scan. Midjourney's target is under 60 seconds, which the company claims would make it 60 times faster and 10 times cheaper than a standard MRI. Those figures are Midjourney's own from an early prototype and have not been independently verified.

Ahmad Abbas, a former Apple Vision Pro hardware engineer who joined Midjourney in late 2023, is leading the hardware project. The underlying imaging technology is licensed from Butterfly Network, which develops ultrasound-on-chip semiconductor modules. The licensing deal—struck in November 2025—includes a $15 million upfront payment, roughly $10 million in annual fees, and up to $74 million in total milestone payments over five years, according to a Butterfly Network regulatory filing.

Midjourney's commercial plan is centered on a "spa" model rather than traditional medical deployment. The company plans to open a first Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco near Union Square by end of 2027—a 25,000-square-foot, four-floor facility combining scanners with saunas, gyms, and cold plunges. The longer-term roadmap targets 50,000 scanners globally and up to one billion scans per month, which the company estimates would require approximately $20 billion in capital—a figure Holz himself labels speculative.

The scanner currently has no FDA clearance for diagnostic use. Midjourney's most viable near-term regulatory path is likely body composition measurement, which carries lower approval hurdles than clinical diagnosis. The company says third-generation hardware with custom silicon is targeted for 2028, with FDA approval attempts beginning around that time.

The pivot is a striking departure for a company that has generated significant revenue from subscription-based AI image generation. Midjourney has been profitable and bootstrapped, which gives it some runway to pursue hardware ventures, but medical device development has a different risk and capital profile than software. The company joins a small field of startups attempting to democratize whole-body imaging, including Ezra and Prenuvo, though Midjourney's ultrasound approach differs meaningfully from the MRI-based methods those companies use.

The story was first reported by Bloomberg and Engadget on June 18, 2026.