Midjourney is a San Francisco-based AI image research lab founded in 2021 by David Holz, the former co-founder of Leap Motion. Unlike most frontier AI labs, Midjourney has never raised venture capital. The company remains independently funded and is widely reported to be profitable, with multiple industry trackers placing its 2026 annual recurring revenue between $500 million and $600 million.
The product is best known for its painterly aesthetic and tight community-driven release cadence. Version 7, released in April 2025 and made the default model in June 2025, introduced Draft Mode and Omni Reference, a new system for controlling how a reference image shapes outputs. Version 8.1, launched in April 2026, focused on speed and resolution, rendering standard jobs roughly four to five times faster than earlier models and supporting native 2K HD generation without upscaling.
In parallel, Midjourney shipped its first video model, V1 Video, in June 2025. The model animates a single still into four five-second clips at 480p and 24fps, positioning Midjourney as a creative engine rather than a pure still-image tool. The lab has also publicly discussed a longer-term roadmap toward "world models," generative systems capable of producing coherent 3D scenes and interactive environments.
Midjourney runs primarily through its web app at midjourney.com, with a Discord interface still supported for legacy workflows. Subscriptions start at $10 per month for the Basic plan and scale to $120 per month for the Mega plan, with a 20% discount on annual billing and additional GPU time priced at $4 per hour across tiers. The company is most popular with designers, concept artists, advertising agencies, and indie creators who prize its visual style over rigid photorealism.