Most founders would defend their original market.
Midjourney did the opposite.
They helped create the AI image generation category.
Then the biggest AI labs turned it into a commodity.
Their response?
Pivot into healthcare and build a full-body imaging platform.
The willingness to abandon yesterday’s success might be the most underrated startup skill.
Everyone arguing about whether the Midjourney Scanner can replace an MRI or CT is missing the point.
The reason it's reasonating so broadly, and especially with technologists, is that it could create a beautiful opportunity for The Bitter Lesson to get a foothold in healthcare.
Almost all of our medical data has been totally bastardized by the way we capture and store it. The EHR is supposed to be a medical record, but it is really a billing system. Every patient encounter gets compressed into a lossy template or heuristic just to facilitate billing logic.
The Bitter Lesson is simple. AI gets powerful when you feed it raw, unfiltered data and let learning, search, and compute to the work.
Stop worrying about whether AI can sharpen the resolution of the ultrasonic tomography. If the images get prettier for human interpretation, that will just be a nice bonus.
The actual goal should be to capture as much raw signal of a person's clinical state as possible. Connect that signal to similar measurement of future outcomes. Then let a model learn from that data with minimal imposition of human judgment or measurement.
Start with the assumption that we don't even necessarily know what we're looking for. This is the way to actually do great medical science.
I've watched this play out in endoscopy. As an example, historically we would take 15-20 minute colonoscopy videos of patients with ulcerative colitis and compress it down into a Mayo score of 0, 1, 2, or 3 based on the single worst moment of the entire video. So much data wasted just because we needed a human-digestible heuristic.
It turns out if you instead capture all of that raw data and use it to train a self-supervised model, those embeddings can actually learn far more about a patient's disease state. So much more that they can actually predict treatment outcomes.
This is why I'm personally fired up about the Midjourney Scanner. Don't think about it like an MRI or CT. Think of it as a beautiful fountain of human health data.
i absolutely love "pure" startups like midjourney
> took zero outside money
> fully bootstrapped
> profitable since basically week one
> doing around $500m a year
> with a team of like 150 people.
which means when the CEO david holz decides he wants to build a sci-fi full-body scanner...
one that lowers you into a pool of water, maps your insides with MRI-level detail at ~100x the speed of an MRI, with no radiation and no giant magnet, there's nobody he has to convince.
he just builds it.
because there's no board or VC asking how a medical spa fits the image-gen roadmap or what the TAM looks like.
founder control is the cheat code.
it's what lets someone make the cool, risky, slightly absurd bet everyone else is too scared to even propose.
more companies like this please.
I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.
If a superhero villain were a car, it would be the Le Mans-winning Bentley Speed 8.
Bentley returned to Le Mans in 2001 after decades away from the race. The Bentley Speed 8 finished 3rd in 2001 and 4th in 2002 before dominating in 2003, when Bentley finished 1st and 2nd overall. The winning car was driven by Tom Kristensen, Rinaldo Capello, and Guy Smith, giving Bentley its most recent overall Le Mans victory.
𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗱: 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗿 𝗱𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝗵𝗼𝗺𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁.
A Tesla Model Y just drove itself from a factory to its new owner’s driveway, and most people saw an autonomous driving milestone.
I did too, at first, but the drive is probably the least interesting part.
The bigger story is that physical assets are starting to behave like agents, which means a car that can deliver itself today could drive itself to a service center tomorrow, recharge itself, reposition itself, and eventually participate in logistics, payments, and revenue generation without waiting for a human to operate every step.
For decades, software lived inside physical products, but now physical products are starting to behave like software.
That is a much bigger shift.
The car is no longer just a vehicle. It is becoming an autonomous participant in a system of decisions, services, payments, and operations.
We spent years talking about AI agents on our screens, and now the next chapter may be AI agents with wheels.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗔𝗜. 𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
What physical product do you think becomes autonomous next?
#AgenticAI #HumanAgentOrchestrator #AIReadiness #FutureOfManagement
İyi pilotla büyük pilotun farkını burdan görebiliriz. Leclerc tam 7 senedir kendisine tam olarak uygun bir araç yaptıramazken Lewis geldiği 2.sene takımı etrafında toplayıp kendine göre araç yaptırdı ve şampiyonluk mücadelesine başladı. Aradaki fark bu.
Toda la vida le voy a estar agradecido al tipo que se le ocurrió meter +60 autos de diferentes categorías a correr en un circuito de 13km durante 24hs seguidas
#WEC#LeMans24
Fred Vasseur on Sir Lewis's work ethic and commitment:
Every Tuesday he was at the factory, ready to start again and keep pushing.” For Vasseur this attitude had a huge impact on the entire team.
"When a seven-time world champion continues to commit in this way, it becomes a huge motivation for all those who work in Maranello."
🤯 The script gets even crazier 🤯
Ferrari's 106th win was Michael Schumacher's first victory as a Ferrari driver at Barcelona in 1996
Lewis Hamilton's 106th win was his first victory as a Ferrari driver at Barcelona in 2026
h/t @do_entecaio
Michael Schumacher's first 4 podiums with Scuderia Ferrari: P3 > P2 > P2 > P1
Lewis Hamilton's first 4 podiums with Scuderia Ferrari: P3 > P2 > P2 > P1
Way too many parallels between these seven time world champions 🤯