Ultralight Startup Midjourney Bootstraps to $200 Million in Revenue

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The global AI image generator market is estimated to grow 17% CAGR to $917.4 million market by 2030 from $300 million in 2023. While tech giants like Adobe and OpenAI keep improving their GenAI capabilities, there are also several smaller companies like Midjourney that are managing to make their mark in the industry while remaining very lean.

Midjourney’s Offerings

San Francisco-based Midjourney was set up in 2022 by David Holz, the co-founder of computer hardware sensor device manufacturer Leap Motion. In 2021, David left Leap Motion to set up another business that would not be tied to venture funding. He recruited 10 engineers to work on “an independent research lab” called Midjourney that was set up with a vision of “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species”. He set up Midjourney as an AI platform that uses text prompts from its subscribers to create high quality images. By February 2022, Midjourney was released as a Discord bot that transformed simple natural language descriptions into diverse artworks. Since its open beta launch in 2022, Midjourney has continuously been improving its imaging capabilities with periodic model updates.

After a user enters their prompt, Midjourney offers them a choice of four images. Users can choose the one that works best for them or enhance the options by providing additional uploads of prompts or images. Users can continue to refine their image by changing styles, colors, sizes, and other features.

It also offers capabilities, such as describe that lets users upload an image and in response Midjourney returns four detailed prompts that include details such as sample ratios and styles. The blend functionality lets users upload two to five images and blend them together.?

Midjourney promotes collaboration across the platform and allows users to share their artwork with other subscribers. They can also refer to images from other subscribers to help build out their own content.

Midjourney is very well liked by its subscribers. Within a year, the website had received 28.5 million visits and had over 250,000 registered users on Discord who were generating over 1 million images a month. Today, Midjourney’s Discord server boasts of 21 million subscribers.

Midjourney’s Financials

Unlike other startups, Midjourney has been very clear on building a successful financial business model. The company has been completely bootstrapped and has not secured any VC funding so far. There are no free subscription plans. Users must choose from one of the four pricing plans offered that range from a basic $10 a month to a mega $120 a month plan. Across the tiers, Midjourney offers different number of images, GPU speeds, and other features.

Midjourney operates on a very lean model. As of 2023, it had only 11 full-time employees. The company claims that it is profitable and was earning $200 million in revenue in 2024. Recent valuation figures are not known, but assuming a 10x multiple on revenue, Midjourney could well be at a $10+ billion valuation.

Midjourney is not the only player in the market. It faces competition from bigger players like Open AI’s DALL-E and Adobe besides similar niche players like Runway and Stable Diffusion.

Given the hype in the AI market, it is highly likely that Midjourney may get acquired. Tech companies like Google, Adobe, and Microsoft could all make suitable buyers as Midjourney’s capabilities will only add to their existing AI offering. However, at 10x valuation, it may be an expensive acquisition.

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