Midjourney pivots from image AI to body-scanning spa venture

An AI image generator best known for spitting out fantasy art is suddenly in the medical imaging business, and the launch announcement managed to leave out the company actually building the hardware. The Register reported on June 18 that Midjourney has stood up a new arm called Midjourney Medical and is planning a San Francisco spa where customers step into a shallow pool of golden light and get scanned by ultrasound, with the first location targeted for the end of 2027.

The setup is a ring of 40 ultrasound imaging modules holding 358,000 transducers that scan up to 1,000 times per second, reportedly producing half-millimeter resolution in roughly a minute. Those 40 modules are the work of Butterfly Network, which put out its own press release to make sure that did not go unnoticed. A 2025 SEC filing referenced in the reporting puts the co-development deal at up to $74 million over five years.

The pitch escalates fast from there. Midjourney's own line is that 'with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs,' with a stated target of 50,000 scanners deployed worldwide by 2031. None of that is approved yet. The plan is to seek FDA clearance starting with body composition mapping and expand capabilities from there.

The honest caveat is that this is an announcement, not a cleared product. What the reporting does not give you is how the scans will be stored or secured, whether they will be used to train Midjourney's algorithms, who is qualified to interpret the results, or how the company validates accuracy against established imaging. Midjourney also still has unresolved copyright lawsuits over the training data behind its image model, and the same instinct toward not crediting other people's work showed up again in the Butterfly omission.

The interesting party here may actually be Butterfly Network. If the FDA pathway holds and the scanner ships, a chip-based ultrasound vendor gets a multi-year revenue floor and a high-profile consumer showcase for its imaging modules. The Midjourney spa is the part that will get the headlines. The part that may quietly matter more is whether commodity ultrasound silicon paired with AI reconstruction can actually approach MRI-grade imaging at a fraction of the cost.