history
the company, sourced and dated — twelve years of leap motion prehistory, the discord opening, v1 through v8.2, the lawsuits, and the scanner.
the leap-motion decade2008–2021
the prehistory — holz and buckwald spend twelve years building leap motion's hand tracking, rebuff apple twice, and sell to ultrahaptics for ~$30m.
- 2008the first hand-tracking prototypesholz builds his first hand-tracking prototypes while an applied-math phd student at unc — the research that becomes leap motion.
- 2010ocuspec foundedholz and michael buckwald — friends since middle school in southern florida — arrive in san francisco 'with two 30-pound backpacks,' build a radio-shack-parts prototype, and pitch vcs. the company is founded as ocuspec inc.
- 2011-06the $1.3m seedocuspec raises a $1.3m seed from andreessen horowitz, founders fund, sosv, and angels including brian mcclendon and bill warner — warner later resurfaces on midjourney's advisor list.
- 2012-05-09renamed leap motionocuspec becomes leap motion with a $12.75m series a led by highland capital — 'wants to change the future of human-computer interaction.'
- 2013-01series b — and the first apple approacha $30m series b lands at a reported ~$306m peak valuation. around the same time apple makes its first acquisition approach; holz reportedly tells the reps their technology 'sucked.' the quotes are anonymous-sourced — holz never confirmed them.
- 2013-07the controller shipsthe ~$80 leap motion controller ships — a small sensor doing precise hand and finger tracking. holz calls it 'inventing a lot of the gestural interface space.' orion vr tracking and the open-source project north star headset follow.
- 2018the second apple deal collapsesapple's second acquisition attempt — a reported $30–50m, roughly a tenth of peak valuation — collapses 'just days before' close. business insider's account leans on anonymous employees, including the famous 'they're the devil' quote holz never publicly confirmed.
- 2019-05-30sold to ultrahaptics — becomes ultraleapuk mid-air-haptics firm ultrahaptics acquires leap motion for ~$30m / £23.4m and renames the combined company ultraleap. buckwald departs; holz stays on as cto. 'we've been working with ultrahaptics for nearly six years.'
- 2021-08holz leaves; midjourney foundedholz leaves ultraleap and founds midjourney in san francisco — 'a home for the next 10 years to work on cool projects.' the technical trigger: watching language understanding and image generation converge, especially katherine crowson's clip-guided diffusion. his linkedin says aug 2021; an sf business registry lists a start date of 2020-09-16 — the discrepancy stays open.
the lab opens2021–2022
a self-funded lab opens a discord server — v1 in closed beta, the economist cover, open beta, and the state-fair win that starts the argument.
- 2021-09first model teststhe first image-model tests and a private demo — 'we started off testing the raw technology in september last year.'
- 2022-02v1 in closed discord betav1 runs in a closed discord beta — roughly 500 users, each allowed to invite one more. holz asks them to share the outputs on social media; the open-channels design is the distribution strategy from day one.
- 2022-03-14the discord server opensthe midjourney discord server opens — the date wikipedia itself flags citation-needed. it will become the largest server the platform has ever hosted.
- 2022-04-12v2 and the paid betav2 ships with upscale and variation buttons, and the paid beta begins — subscriptions before the product leaves discord.
- 2022-06-11the economist coverthe economist puts a midjourney-generated collage on its cover for a foundation-models special report — nearly 250 prompts, ~1,000 images. the legitimizing moment, weeks before the open beta. (the cosmopolitan ai cover the same month was dall·e 2 — the two are routinely conflated.)
- 2022-07-12open betaopen beta — anyone can join the discord and generate. 'we don't know if our servers are ready, but we're ready to find out.'
- 2022-07-25v3 — and the biggest server on discordv3 ships with --stylize and --quality; the discord passes ~1m members — reportedly overtaking the fortnite and minecraft servers.
- 2022-08the interview blitzthe interview blitz — verge, register, forbes — coincides with opening the bot to any discord server ('the midjourney multiverse'). holz tells the register the ~10-person company is 'already profitable, and we're fine.'
- 2022-08-26the state-fair winjason allen's 'théâtre d'opéra spatial' — made with midjourney, submitted under 'jason m. allen via midjourney' — wins the colorado state fair's digital-art category and a $300 ribbon. vice amplifies it days later; allen's sharper line lands via kevin roose: 'ai won. humans lost.'
- 2022-09-16the consent answerasked by forbes whether he sought living artists' consent, holz answers 'no. there isn't really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from.' the candor recirculates in december and ends up quoted in the plaintiffs' filings.
- 2022-11-05v4 — and niji・journeyv4 alpha ships on a new codebase — models trained on google tpus from here on. the same month, niji・journey enters closed beta with spellbrush, the sf/tokyo studio behind waifu labs.
- 2022-12-14the artstation revolt'no to ai generated images' — alexander nanitchkov's protest image, amplified by nicholas kole, floods artstation's front page with 2,000+ posts. artstation makes its noai tag opt-in rather than default, which keeps the story alive.
off discord island2023–2024
the style-list leak, the stability ban, rooms and personalization, the alpha site opening to everyone — the escape from discord island.
- 2023-12-12the alpha sitethe alpha website opens to users with 10,000+ generations — the first real step off discord after nearly two years.
- 2023-12-21v6 alphav6 alpha — the third model 'trained from scratch on our ai superclusters,' nine months of training, with 'minor text drawing ability' and overhauled prompting. the discord is at 17m+ members.
- 2023-12the hardware hireahmad abbas joins as head of hardware — revealed in february: ex-apple vision pro engineering manager, ex-neuralink, ex-leap motion. the early focus is 3d data capture; 'orb' is the reported project nickname.
- 2024-01-02the style list leaksthe 'midjourney style list' goes viral — a ~16,000-name sheet of artists midjourney can mimic, allegedly shared by holz in the public discord in 2022, lands next to a 4,700-name court exhibit filed as exhibit j. kahlo, kusama, warhol, rockwell, wes anderson, disney.
- 2024-01-29niji 6 and --srefniji 6 alpha ships; style reference --sref follows days later — the anime line becomes where new reference features surface first.
- 2024-03-06the stability bana ~24-hour outage is blamed on 'botnet-like activity' from paid accounts linked to a stability ai data-team member 'trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on saturday.' at that week's office hours midjourney bans all stability employees indefinitely; mostaque denies intentional scraping. nick st. pierre's relay is how the news surfaces.
- 2024-03-12--crefcharacter reference --cref ships — persistent characters across generations, the feature comic and storyboard artists had been asking for.
- 2024-03-20the world-simulation roadmapoffice hours: 'we're really trying to get to the world simulation. we're building 3d midjourney, video mj, & real-time mj where things move really really fast' — build each independently, then merge into 'the open world sandbox.' the roadmap said out loud; no official transcript exists.
- 2024-05-24roomsrooms — private collaborative web spaces for users past 100 images, mirrored to discord channels. the community moves to midjourney's own property.
- 2024-06-12personalizationmodel personalization --p ships — every user can tune the model by pair-ranking images. taste becomes a stored per-user artifact.
- 2024-07-31v6.1v6.1 — coherence, skin, small faces, ~25% faster, new upscalers; made default the same day.
- 2024-08-12discovery opensorrick lets the copyright and lanham act claims against midjourney proceed to discovery — including the ~4,700-name 'midjourney style list' as evidence — while dmca claims die with prejudice. orrick: plausible the tools were 'created to facilitate that infringement by design.'
- 2024-08-21the web opens to allthe web opens to everyone — a real site with google/discord sign-in and a restored ~25-image free trial. 'escape from discord island.'
- 2024-08-28officially into hardware'we're officially getting into hardware. if you're interested in joining the new team in san francisco please email us.' — the x post that makes the abbas hire legible in public.
- 2024-10-23the editor — and holodeck talkthe external image editor ships — edit any uploaded image, retexture, plus next-gen ai moderation — with holz saying they'll 'restrict the deployment.' office-hours reporting the same season describes a 'holodeck' 3d project and a second hardware effort.
- 2024-12-11patchworkpatchwork ships as a research preview — a multiplayer infinite canvas for worldbuilding, mixing llms and image models, led by max kreminski's storytelling lab. the first public artifact of the world-model agenda.
video, lawsuits, and the scanner2025–
v7 and v8, the video model, disney/universal and warner bros. in court — then the 'secret hardware project' turns out to be a medical scanner and a union square spa.
- 2025-04-04v7 alphav7 alpha — the first new architecture in nearly a year: personalization on by default (rate ~200 image pairs to unlock), 10× draft mode at half cost, turbo and relax tiers. it lands a week after openai's ghibli moment floods every feed.
- 2025-05omni-referenceomni-reference --oref replaces --cref for v7 — characters, objects, and scenes with an --ow weight from 1–1000.
- 2025-06-11disney and universal suedisney and universal sue in c.d. cal. — the first major-studio ai suit. the 110-page complaint calls midjourney 'a bottomless pit of plagiarism,' alleges $300m 2024 revenue and ~21m users, quotes holz's own scraping candor, and asks for an injunction including against the imminent video service. holz that week: 'i think midjourney is going to be around for a very long time.'
- 2025-06-17v7 goes defaultv7 becomes the default model — six days after the studios' filing.
- 2025-06-18v1 videothe v1 video model ships — image-to-video, four 5-second clips per job, extendable to ~21s, priced at roughly one image per second of video and 'over 25 times cheaper than what the market has shipped.' holz frames it as 'a stepping stone' toward 'real-time open-world simulations.'
- 2025-07-30midjourney tvmidjourney tv launches — a 24/7 stream of top community videos at midjourney.tv plus personalized feeds. hd video (native 720p, pro/mega) follows in august.
- 2025-08-06the fair-use answermidjourney answers the disney suit: training is fair use — 'to understand concepts by extracting statistical information,' the way a person learns by looking. the filing notes 'many dozens' of subscribers on the plaintiffs' own corporate email domains and quotes bob iger praising ai as 'an invaluable tool for artists.'
- 2025-09-04warner bros. discovery sueswarner bros. discovery becomes the third studio — superman, batman, bugs bunny, rick and morty — and adds a sharper allegation: that midjourney removed prior copyright protections after the disney filing. up to $150k statutory damages per work.
- 2025time100 and isefholz makes the time100 ai list (portrait credited to sxsw) and appears at regeneron isef as a society for science trustee — midjourney sponsors the fair's 'technology enhances the arts' award. he is a 2006 isef alum; his high-school project lost 'to somebody who cured a disease.'
- 2026-01-09niji v7niji v7 — the spellbrush line keeps pace with the main model.
- 2026-03-17v8 alpha — the pytorch rewritev8 alpha — the codebase rewritten from the google-tpu stack to gpu-native pytorch: native 2k --hd, --q 4 coherence, ~5x faster than v7, and personalization, moodboards, and srefs carried over. a big training run ('possibly called v8.1') is teased days later.
- 2026-03-29the 2026 check-inholz tells the information revenue 'significantly surpassed' $200m and has grown despite declining web traffic — and that the hardware ambitions might force the company's first vc raise. reported; paywalled, relayed via winbuzzer.
- 2026-04-14v8.1 and v8.2v8.1 alpha (default june 10–11: 4s sd / 12s hd renders, hd ~3× cheaper); v8.2 lands july 24 as the current default and ships the new edit model — replacing omni reference, character reference, and retexture in one.
- 2026-06-17midjourney medical — the scanner and the spathe 'secret hardware project' is revealed in a livestream (~30k x viewers): midjourney medical, a new division, and the midjourney scanner — a water-immersion full-body ultrasound-ct built on 40 butterfly network modules (358,000 elements, ~½mm detail, a one-minute scan goal). plus a 24/7 spa at 300 grant ave, union square — 23,000 sq ft on a 10-year lease, targeting end-2027. the ambitions — 50,000+ scanners by ~2031, 'a billion scans a month' — are company goals, not results.
- 2026-08-12the chief design officer surfacesoffice hours hosted while holz is away: duncan wilson (web team lead) and banu güler — the co-star co-founder, now midjourney's chief design officer.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.