Midjourney, the company best known for turning text prompts into images, has announced something it has never made before: hardware. And not a phone case or a pair of glasses, but a full-body medical scanner.
At an event in San Francisco on June 17, founder David Holz unveiled “The Midjourney Scanner,” and a new division to house it, Midjourney Medical. You step into a shallow pool, a platform lowers you into the water at five centimetres a second, and a ring of sensors images your insides as you descend.
Holz claimed the result is “in many ways superior to even MRI machines”, with no radiation and none of the heavy magnets an MRI needs, at “nearly a hundred times the speed”. The company says a scan takes about 60 seconds, against the 60 to 90 minutes a full-body MRI can take.
The hardware was built with Butterfly Network, an ultrasound firm Midjourney licensed in November 2025, using 40 of its “ultrasound-on-chip” modules per machine.
An AI company’s big launch that, by its own admission, barely uses AI #
Here is the twist. Midjourney’s entire reputation rests on generative AI, yet the scanner mostly does not use it. “We’re not even using any AI in this yet, just really cool hardware and software,” Holz said, per Bloomberg. The company does use AI to segment and label what a scan shows, but the imaging itself is ultrasound and signal processing.
Big claims, no track record, no clearance #
It is worth slowing down on the word “claimed”. Midjourney makes pictures. It has never built a physical product, never operated a medical device, and the scanner has no regulatory clearance.
By Midjourney’s own account, the device currently produces only “detailed body composition maps”. Anything diagnostic, the thing that would make it a true rival to an MRI, needs FDA approval the company says it has yet to obtain and intends to pursue over time.
The ambitions are vast. Midjourney says it wants a fleet of more than 50,000 scanners worldwide by 2031, with the capacity for “a billion scans a month”, and claims that enough early imaging could one day “avoid 30 per cent of all deaths and 50 per cent of all healthcare costs”. Holz declined to say what a scan will cost.
None of that is shipping today. These are targets, not results.
And then there’s the spa #
The detail that captures how speculative this all is: Midjourney plans to open a “Midjourney Spa” in San Francisco around the end of 2027. It is reported to be a roughly 25,000 sq ft space near Union Square, fitted with nine or 10 scanners alongside hot tubs, saunas and cold plunges.
The pitch is that the scan becomes a side-effect of a nice day out, done as often as you like.
Whole-body screening of healthy people is contested in medicine for good reasons, chiefly false positives and incidental findings that send people for unnecessary, sometimes invasive, follow-ups. A scanner promising a billion scans a month would multiply that debate, not settle it.
Midjourney, which is fighting intellectual-property lawsuits from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery over its image tool, has no outside investors and calls itself a “community-backed research lab”. For now, the most accurate way to describe the Midjourney Scanner is an ambition with a launch event attached. Whether it becomes a medical product is a question for regulators, not a keynote.
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