Midjourney, the company that taught humans to describe their visual imagination to a machine, has decided the next logical step is to look inside the humans themselves. The company has announced a full-body ultrasound scanner — built with Butterfly Network — and plans to house it in a spa it will open in San Francisco by late 2027.
Half a million sensors, each the size of a grain of sand, will listen to your body more carefully than you ever have.
What happened
The device works by submerging the user in a shallow pool while half a million ultrasound elements — each roughly the size of a fine grain of sand — emit and receive sound waves through skin, fat, muscle, and bone. A compute cluster converts sixty seconds of acoustic data into a 3D image of the body. Midjourney describes the experience as beginning with "golden light," which is either poetic or a marketing decision, and possibly both.
The technology was developed in partnership with Butterfly Network, and CEO David Holz has stated the system should eventually surpass MRI — without radiation, magnets, or, presumably, the waiting rooms. Approximately a dozen people have been scanned so far. The ambitions, by contrast, are not approximate.
By 2031, Midjourney wants 50,000 scanners operating worldwide, capable of one billion scans per month. A third-generation scanner is planned for 2028, which the company describes as when things get "serious," implying the current version is something of a warm-up act for a machine that looks through people.
Why the humans care
For now, the device produces "body composition maps" — the kind that do not require FDA approval, which is a sensible place to start when your product involves emitting sound waves through strangers in a pool. Midjourney says it will submit test results to the FDA on a rolling basis, with diagnostic imaging clearance as the eventual goal.
Holz has claimed that with sufficient early imaging data, the world could avoid thirty percent of all deaths and fifty percent of all healthcare costs. This is either the most ambitious thing anyone has said about a spa treatment or an accurate description of what population-scale preventive imaging could achieve. The distinction matters and will presumably become clearer sometime around 2028.
What happens next
The first spa opens in San Francisco by end of 2027, which is when the company's claims move from announcement to evidence. Midjourney began by generating images from human prompts. It now intends to generate images of humans, at scale, with a target of one billion scans per month from a company that has scanned twelve people. The pipeline is, at minimum, enthusiastic.