Every company eventually asks what it wants to be when it grows up. Most pick an answer that fits the business they already run.
A software firm builds more software. A retailer opens more stores. The safe move is to stay in your lane and defend the turf you already own.
Artificial intelligence (AI) labs have mostly followed that script. The biggest names, OpenAI and Google among them, keep fighting over the same crowded ground: chatbots, coding assistants, and the image and video generators that now flood social feeds.
The competition is brutal, the copyright lawsuits are piling up, and the pressure to look different from the next lab gets heavier every quarter.
So when one of those image companies finally answered the question of what it wants to become, I expected the usual: another model, another app, maybe a cheaper monthly plan to undercut a rival.
What I did not expect was a pivot this far off the map. The company behind some of the internet’s most recognizable AI art, Midjourney, said on June 17 that it is building a full-body medical scanner.
How Midjourney went from AI art to body scans
Midjourney is not a typical Silicon Valley story. The lab has no outside investors and runs on subscription fees of $10 to $120 a month, according to PYMNTS.
Founder David Holz, who earlier co-founded the gesture-control company Leap Motion, has turned Midjourney into one of the most recognizable names in generative imagery.
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That is what makes the swerve so strange. An image lab with no venture backers and no hardware history just told the world its next act is a medical scanner meant to rival a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.
Holz pitched it as the first genuinely new full-body imaging technology in five decades. The company admitted in its announcement that the idea sits far outside anything it has built before.
The scanner is one of eight projects the lab is running, split evenly between hardware and software, according to PYMNTS. Most companies would bury a medical device in a research note. Midjourney made it the headline.
The mechanism reads like science fiction. You step onto a platform that lowers you into a shallow pool of warm water at about two inches per second, while a ring of sensors fires sound waves through your body from every angle.
Midjourney compares the sensors to a dolphin using echolocation.
Shinsei Motions / Getty Images
Inside the Midjourney scanner, spa, and Butterfly deal
The product, announced June 17, is called the Midjourney Scanner, and it anchors a new division named Midjourney Medical. The company says a prototype builds a full three-dimensional map of the body in 60 seconds, with no radiation and no powerful magnets.
The pitch is built for people who hate hospitals. The system is “as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa,” according to Midjourney’s blog post.
Then comes the part that explains the warm water. Since you are already wet, Midjourney is building a spa to go with the machine.
The first one is set for San Francisco’s Union Square, spanning three floors with a gym, saunas, cold plunges, and hot tubs, with about ten scanners inside, opening in 2027.
Here is where the markets reader needs to slow down. Midjourney is privately held, so you cannot buy its stock.
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The investable angle runs through its hardware partner. The scanner is built on chips from Butterfly Network (NYSE: BFLY), and its shares jumped after the reveal, according to Yahoo Finance.
Midjourney licensed Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip technology in November 2025, and each current prototype packs 40 of those chips, according to Butterfly Network.
The agreement could be worth up to $74 million to Butterfly over five years, with $15 million paid up front and $10 million in annual fees, according to PYMNTS.
The partnership “represents a potentially meaningful commercial opportunity for Butterfly,” said its chief executive, Joseph DeVivo.
The Midjourney pitch by the numbers:
- 60-second full-body scan with no radiation or magnets, according to Midjourney
- 40 Butterfly ultrasound-on-chip modules in each prototype, says Butterfly Network
- Up to $74 million in payments to Butterfly over five years, according to PYMNTS
- 50,000 scanners and 1 billion scans a month targeted by 2031, per PYMNTS
- First spa opening in San Francisco in 2027, according to Midjourney
What the Midjourney scanner means for your health and money
When I ran the claims against what the company has actually shipped, the gap was wide.
Holz has acknowledged the scanner barely uses artificial intelligence, it has no clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and only about a dozen people have been scanned so far.
Doctors have concerns that go past the hardware. Frequent full-body scans can surface incidental findings and false positives that drive anxiety and unnecessary follow-up care, radiologists told Business Insider.
The federal screening standard backs that caution. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends preventive scans only when the evidence shows a clear net benefit, and regulators have grown stricter about consumer health products, as TheStreet highlighted.
Not everyone is waving it off. Ultrasound is promising, but it cannot replace an MRI, a computed tomography (CT) scan, or a colonoscopy, because “different scans do different things,” science communicator Hank Green wrote, as reported by Business Insider.
My read is that this looks less like a finished medical breakthrough and more like a very expensive bet that casual scanning becomes normal.
The wallet question is the one Midjourney has not answered. The company has stayed quiet on what a scan will cost, who stores your health data, and whether insurance covers any of it, all of which decide whether this reaches regular people or stays a luxury for the wealthy and worried.
Midjourney wants 50,000 scanners running worldwide and a billion scans a month by 2031, with a custom-silicon version due in 2028, according to PYMNTS.
That timeline only matters if the FDA agrees the scans help and if people actually want a body map with their sauna. The one sure winner today is Butterfly, and the next real test is whether the 2027 spa opens with paying customers or just a very photogenic pool.
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