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The self-funded AI research lab behind the most widely used AI image generator
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2021 | Employees: ~100-180 (2026, est.) | Stage: Bootstrapped / Self-funded (profitable, est. ~$10B valuation) | Website: https://www.midjourney.com
Midjourney was founded in August 2021 by David Holz, a physicist/mathematician who previously spent years at NASA Langley and the Max Planck Institute before co-founding Leap Motion, a hand-tracking hardware company acquired by Ultrahaptics in 2019. Holz set out to build an 'independent research lab' exploring new forms of imagination and creativity. The product launched into open beta on July 12, 2022 as a Discord bot, and quickly became the most widely used image generator in the world — beloved for its distinctive, painterly, artistically excellent output rather than raw prompt-following.\n\nFrom the start, Midjourney was deliberately and radically different on the business side: it took zero outside investment, rejected offers (including reported interest from Meta and others), and is
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