Highlights:

  • In December, Ahmand Abbas, who had previously worked at Leap Motion and spent five years at Apple working on the Apple Vision Pro, was also hired by Midjourney as the “head of hardware.”
  • In 2023, the company generated an astounding USD 200 million in revenue while having just 40 employees.

Recently on X Inc., Midjourney Inc. announced getting into hardware. The AI image generation company is looking to board new members to its team to help in the new effort.

It’s unclear exactly what hardware Midjourney intends to produce. Hardware development is not often a business that AI image generating companies undertake. However, the market is still in its infancy, so perhaps the question is: Why not?

It has been noted that Midjourney’s current talent pool contains some hints about what the company might be thinking about constructing. David Holz, the Creator and CEO of Midjourney, was formerly Leap Motion’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder.

Despite lofty goals and even a rumoured acquisition interest from Apple Inc., Leap Motion was an early and well-funded firm in the virtual and augmented reality area that ran out of funds and was sold in a fire sale for USD 30 million in 2019. Subsequent iterations of Leap Motion, presently referred to as Ultraleap, attempted to concentrate on commercial products but had only patchy success.

In December, Ahmand Abbas, who had previously worked at Leap Motion and spent five years at Apple working on the Apple Vision Pro, was also hired by Midjourney as the “head of hardware.”

Given Abbas and Holz’s backgrounds, the potential hardware product might fall into the AR or VR space; nonetheless, this is a strange side project considering Midjourney is an AI image-creation firm. The business has previously said that it is expanding into 3D, video, and real-time generation models; there may be some crossover potential in these areas. For instance, a generative AI video model may be used to create virtual reality experiences.

In some reply on X, Midjourney wrote, “We aren’t announcing anything specific yet, but we have multiple efforts in flight,” indicating that the company has multiple hardware projects in line.

Any project Midjourney plans to do will cost capital, and unlike other startups, it is fully bootstrapped and has never received venture capital funding. In 2023, the company generated an astounding USD 200 million in revenue while having just 40 employees. However, the cost of developing hardware is high, so given that Midjourney is now hiring for ambitious aspirations, it wouldn’t be shocking to see them look to secure venture financing soon.