Midjourney Goes Hardware: Plans AI Ultrasound Scanner for 2027

On June 18, David Holz, Midjourney’s CEO, unveiled Midjourney Scanner as the company’s first hardware product, moving Midjourney’s medical hardware division beyond AI image generation. Built for wellness imaging, the device is an ultrasound-based full-body scanner, not an available diagnostic tool.

Midjourney is best known as an AI image-generation provider, but the Scanner marks an attempt to move into health-adjacent hardware. The product is being framed first as a wellness device that could create quick 3D maps of body composition, such as muscle, fat, bone and organs, rather than as a tool for diagnosing disease. That distinction matters because medical diagnosis would require more testing and regulatory clearance, while wellness scanning can be marketed with narrower claims.

Near-term use will start with fast body-composition maps of muscle, fat, bone, and organs rather than disease diagnosis. A first Midjourney Spa release is planned for San Francisco in 2027, keeping the early service closer to wellness scanning while expanded medical capabilities remain tied to testing and regulatory clearance.

How the Scanner Is Supposed to Work

A person would stand on a platform that lowers through water at about 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second. A ring of underwater sensors sends ultrasonic sound waves from many angles and records returning signals for the 60-second scanner design.

Sound-wave imaging would build pictures from returning echoes rather than from camera-style surface images. Midjourney is pitching the scanner as a body-composition system before any disease-diagnosis role.

Midjourney’s scan-duration goal is no more than 60 seconds, producing a reconstructed 3D body map.

Reconstructed body volumes are meant to look a lot like today’s MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed. Because the Ultrasonic CT uses no X-rays; it is ultrasound, the comparison is about intended image appearance and speed rather than magnetic-resonance physics.

Computed tomography usually means X-ray-based cross-sectional imaging, while magnetic resonance imaging uses magnetic fields. For The Midjourney Scanner, the Ultrasonic CT label refers to ultrasound reconstruction and product positioning rather than a conventional CT modality. Two petaflops of processing power sit behind the sensor system, pairing substantial compute with the physical scan.

Butterfly Network and Midjourney’s Hardware Shift

Ultrasound-on-chip partner Butterfly Network gives the scanner a hardware base outside Midjourney’s software roots. Butterfly co-development supports the scanner hardware, and the plan depends on Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip technology. Butterfly’s chip approach puts ultrasound transducers directly on a CMOS chip that can transmit and receive sound waves.

Each scanner system uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules, giving the hardware plan a concrete component count rather than only a concept name.

Midjourney signed an agreement with Butterfly in November 2025 for ultrasound-on-chip technology, with licensing terms that include a $15 million one-time fee and a $10 million annual license fee over five years.

Midjourney had already formed a hardware team in San Francisco in 2024, and its earlier hardware ambitions pointed beyond image-generation software before the scanner plan emerged now. Capital needs will apply to the company that has not taken outside investors so far.

Consumer health hardware will add a trust problem because medical assertions, regulatory review, and sensitive user data carry heavier obligations than creative AI tools. AI health features have already run into FDA and reliability concerns. Body-composition data without diagnostic assertions sits closer to a general-wellness regulatory lane used by whole-body MRI services such as Prenuvo and Ezra,.

What Has to Happen Before Medical Claims Expand

Diagnostic medical capabilities normally require U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. That’s why Midjourney Medical’s near-term path starts with body-composition maps while it submits test results for expanded capabilities. The company says about a dozen people have been scanned so far, a small base for a product that still needs repeated trials before broader uses can expand.

Users may eventually let doctors, AI health tools, or others access a substantial library of data about your health. Holz’s personal-use pitch centers on daily measurable information and repeated scans that track changes over time. So far, data-policy details remain incomplete until the product moves closer to availability.

Midjourney plans to use the next 12 months for algorithm and hardware refinement, research trials, second-generation hardware, and preparation for a first research spa. Its 2031 ambition is more than 50,000 scanners worldwide and a billion scans a month. The 2027 spa milestone, research trials, and any FDA-cleared expansion will remain critical for turning the wellness-imaging plan into a medical platform.