Midjourney

Midjourney, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence company that describes itself as an independent research lab, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2022 by David Holz (previously a co-founder of Leap Motion). The flagship product - the Midjourney generative text-to-image system - entered open beta on July 12, 2022. The tool is accessed via a Discord bot (the /imagine command) or a web interface launched in August 2024 alongside version V6.1. The current model version is V8.1 (alpha released April 14, 2026). The company also offers the Niji variant fine-tuned for anime-style generation (up to V7). Starting with the fourth version, Midjourney's models are trained on Google TPUs in Google Cloud. Holz told The Register in August 2022 that the company was already profitable. The company is privately held and funded through subscriptions. Midjourney is a defendant in several high-profile copyright infringement lawsuits, including: the Andersen, McKernan, and Ortiz artists' lawsuit (January 2023), a class action by over 4,700 artists (November 2023), a suit by The Walt Disney Company and Universal Pictures (June 11, 2025), and a suit by Warner Bros. Discovery (September 4, 2025).