Midjourney CEO David Holz unveiled The Midjourney Scanner, a ring-based full-body ultrasound device developed with Butterfly Network. He envisions a San Francisco spa in Union Square—opening before the end of 2027—with scanning rooms, a gym, saunas, and cold p
By the time David Holz finished the livestreamed reveal, it was clear the pitch wasn’t really about “cat pictures” anymore.
Holz. the CEO behind Midjourney’s AI image generator. used the moment to show the company’s first hardware product: The Midjourney Scanner. He described it as an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that’s designed to capture vertical slices of the inside of the body using a ring of sensors. The goal, he said, is image quality that could be comparable to MRI in many ways.
The scanner isn’t presented as a futuristic gadget you might try once. Holz said, ideally, you could use it either once a year or even every single day—aiming for measurable insight into how your body changes.
He set a personal tone during the demonstration. Holz said one use he wants is to see how his body responds to diet and workout changes. “I’m not the most measured man on Earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily [measurable information],” he said.
Midjourney’s medical effort is backed by a partnership with ultrasound tech company Butterfly Network. Butterfly Network said the system uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system.”
The scanning experience. as described. starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into water on rails through a ring of sensors. Thousands of transducers create ultrasonic waves and record the ripples as the waves travel through the body. producing detailed 3D images. Midjourney Medical says the scan takes about 60 seconds.
Holz framed the mechanism in a way that makes the motion feel almost playful: you descend into the water. your body passes through the ring of underwater sensors. and each sensor “acts like a dolphin. ” sending sound waves through your body from every angle and building the internal image from enough waves and enough angles.
The pitch also includes computation. The system combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power.
Even so, Holz’s medical leap raises a question: what, exactly, does Midjourney’s AI image generation technology have to do with Midjourney Medical’s scanner? After watching the reveal, the connection wasn’t immediately clear beyond the idea of an alternative business for otherwise-unused AI compute.
Still, the company is pushing forward with a concrete launch plan. Holz hopes to place 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square, opening before the end of 2027. For the launch event, he offered to scan attendees’ hands.
That spa, according to Holz’s vision, will blend fitness and recovery amenities with scanning rooms designed around the water. It will include a gym, saunas, and cold plunges, plus hot tub-equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned.
The company’s own job listings describe the ambition even more aggressively: the aim is to “build and launch the world’s first full-body ultrasound CT scanner,” ultimately bringing “safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.”
Not every use-case, though, can move as quickly as a consumer appointment. Holz said medical applications will require FDA clearances, and Midjourney Medical says it is working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging.
Midjourney Medical also says the “library of scans” users create can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or others. It adds a privacy promise, saying, “We take data privacy seriously — more details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”
Holz went further in outlining what he wants the technology to become. He suggested that these scans could eventually be better than an MRI—without radiation, without powerful magnets, and without other complicating factors—so people can look at what’s happening inside their bodies “real fast.”
In response to a question, Holz also imagined regulatory flexibility. He described a future where the FDA has a class of devices to evaluate “weird” things and allows people to “just try to get as much data as we can.”
In the meantime, the first real sign of Midjourney Medical’s direction is physical: a ring of sensors, a drop into water, and a 60-second scan timed for the kind of repeat tracking Holz says he wants—daily if the system can handle it.
Midjourney Scanner David Holz Midjourney Medical ultrasound CT Butterfly Network FDA clearance body composition maps San Francisco spa Union Square
So it’s like an ultrasound but it’s for Midjourney now? weird.
Waiting for the day they scan you and then your AI generates a “spa version” of your organs or something. Also 60 seconds sounds too good to be true, like do they miss stuff? /
I saw this and thought “cat pictures” like immediately lol. But ultrasound into MRI quality?? Isn’t MRI like magnet stuff, how can a ring do that? Sounds like marketing to me, like they just want Union Square rent money.
Union Square spa with saunas and a scanner… sure. Next thing you know it’s $500 a year for “vertical slices” and they’re telling you to drink more cold water. I’m not saying it won’t be cool, but they said you could do it every day and that’s a lot. Like what if people start scanning constantly for no reason? Also who even owns the data from that?