Every company eventually asks what it wants to be when it grows up. Most pick an answer that fits the business they already run.<\/p>\n
Read more Here\u2019s where to find free parking in downtown Raleigh for Canes Stanley Cup parade<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence (AI<\/a>) 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.<\/p>\n The competition is brutal, the copyright lawsuits are piling up, and the pressure to look different from the next lab gets heavier every quarter.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Related: The Mental Health Effects of AI Driven Job Insecurity<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The scanner is one of eight projects the lab is running, split evenly between hardware and software, according to PYMNTS<\/a>. Most companies would bury a medical device in a research note. Midjourney made it the headline.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Midjourney compares the sensors to a dolphin using echolocation.<\/p>\n Shinsei Motions \/ Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>‘s blog post.<\/p>\n Then comes the part that explains the warm water. Since you are already wet, Midjourney is building a spa to go with the machine.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Read more NeNe Leakes’ Son Bryson Arrested for Violating Probation<\/a><\/p>\n Here is where the markets reader needs to slow down. Midjourney is privately held, so you cannot buy its stock.<\/p>\n More Healthcare<\/strong>:<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Midjourney licensed Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip technology in November 2025, and each current prototype packs 40 of those chips, according to Butterfly Network<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The partnership “represents a potentially meaningful commercial opportunity for Butterfly,” said its chief executive, Joseph DeVivo.<\/p>\n When I ran the claims against what the company has actually shipped, the gap was wide.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> highlighted.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n My read is that this looks less like a finished medical breakthrough and more like a very expensive bet that casual scanning becomes normal.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n