Midjourney Goes Medical

Kieran Ryan

30 Jun 2026 — 4 min read

This first ran in the Solo Founders newsletter, covering the people, companies, and ideas shaping the rise of solo founders.

“By VC standards we should either ‘conquer the world or die in a fire,’ and neither of these are spiritually compelling for me. I never wanted a company. I just wanted a home.”

David Holz built Midjourney into one of the most popular AI image generators in the world without taking money from investors. It reportedly generates around $500M in annual revenue.

This month, he revealed Midjourney’s move into healthcare: Midjourney Medical.

The new division has already built the first version of what Holz calls “Ultrasonic CT.” It uses sound and water to produce detailed 3D images similar to an MRI, without radiation or magnets. The team is now working toward scanning an entire body in under 60 seconds, nearly 100 times faster than an MRI.

It is a genuinely astonishing next act.

Midjourney could easily spend the next decade making better image models. Instead, Holz is using the profits from one of AI’s biggest success stories to build medical hardware, run clinical trials, and eventually open a global network of health spas.

For most of us, an MRI happens only after a doctor has a reason to look. Holz wants imaging to happen early and often, giving us a record of our bodies over time so we can catch problems sooner and see what changes as we exercise, eat differently, or age.

Midjourney believes the payoff could rank among the most important advances in the history of medicine:

“We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs.”

The first Midjourney Spa is planned for San Francisco in 2027. By 2031, Midjourney wants 50,000 scanners around the world with the capacity to perform a billion scans every month.

The thread running through everything Holz builds

At first, it seems random, even a little absurd, for a generative AI company to move into medical imaging and health spas. But it starts to make more sense when you hear Holz describe what he cares about.

“I’ve always been more interested in empowering people and trying to make people better.”

His first company, Leap Motion, built hand-tracking hardware that let people control digital interfaces with their hands. Holz later described the work as “inventing a lot of the gestural interface space.”

Then came Midjourney. Holz has never called it an art company. He calls it an imagination company, built to “expand the imaginative powers of the human species.” Type a sentence, and a picture of whatever you were imagining appears in seconds.

Midjourney Medical carries that same goal, empowering people and trying to make them better, into healthcare. Holz wants to make imaging fast and accessible enough to catch problems before symptoms appear, shifting medicine from reacting to disease toward preventing it.

Hand tracking, image generation, and medical scanning are wildly different products. The belief behind them has stayed remarkably consistent: technology should empower us and make us better.

For founders like Holz, the work isn’t simply a job. It’s part of who they are. Michael Grinich, the solo founder of WorkOS, described this kind of founder on our podcast:

“You can’t turn it off. It’d be like sitting down with Miles Davis and asking, ‘When do you stop thinking about music?’ He’d be like, what are you talking about? The person is the expression.”

Only an independent Midjourney could move into medicine

Holz has described wanting a home rather than a company. He’d taken the venture route before, raising nearly $100 million for Leap Motion, but with Midjourney he bootstrapped instead. That’s given him something rare: the freedom to spend years working on projects he believes matter without needing approval from investors or a board.

When he decided to put the company’s profits behind a 60-second body scanner, the call was his.

Some solo founders guard that freedom fiercely because they’ve felt the alternative.

Dhravya Shah, the solo founder of Supermemory, has lived through that alternative. An earlier company of his, a hosting startup, died in a co-founder breakup. One co-founder, he says, “went rogue,” and they had to scramble to sell the business before it was torn apart. He has tried working with potential co-founders since and kept hitting the same wall: who gets to decide where the company goes.

“I don’t want to wake up every day and argue with someone about what we should do next. There’s a lot of easy money everywhere in the world. I don’t want to do that. I want to go for the thing that’s hard, that takes years, where we might not make any money, where we might die, might be on the streets, but we have to do this.”

That is the freedom Holz has with Midjourney. He can commit the company to something hard, slow, and incredibly important without having to win an argument first.

The bet may still fail. Independence doesn’t make it safer. It simply gives Holz the freedom to make it.

What to take from it

You don’t have to be reinventing the MRI for this to land.

The biggest swings tend to come from founders who have kept the freedom to choose their own direction. For Holz, that meant staying solo and bootstrapped. For others, it might mean choosing co-founders and investors who believe in the hard, slow version as much as they do.

Either way, the goal is the same: make sure no one can talk you off the thing you’re meant to build.

Holz kept that freedom. Now he’s spending it trying to change medicine. We think he just might succeed.

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