Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI-driven image generation platform that transforms textual descriptions into visual art, offering styles ranging from photorealistic to surrealistic. Users interact with the service through Discord commands or the official website, enabling the creation of diverse and imaginative images.

Founded in August 2021 by David Holz, a former NASA researcher and co-founder of Leap Motion, Midjourney began as an independent research lab in San Francisco. The platform entered open beta on July 12, 2022, and quickly gained popularity for its unique artistic outputs. By the end of 2024, the Midjourney Discord server had approximately 20 million registered users, reflecting its rapid adoption.

Midjourney's flagship product is its AI image generation tool, which utilizes a large language model and a diffusion model trained on extensive datasets of images paired with text descriptions. This technology allows users to generate images in various styles, including photorealistic, painterly, cinematic, and surrealistic. In April 2025, the company released version 7, introducing a draft mode that produces prototype images at ten times the speed and half the cost of standard mode images.

Midjourney has achieved significant financial milestones, reaching an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $500 million in 2025 without external funding. This growth was partly fueled by a major deal with Meta, though the specifics of the agreement remain unclear. The company has also faced legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed by Disney and NBCUniversal in June 2025, accusing Midjourney of copyright infringement for generating images featuring their copyrighted characters.