Midjourney is building hardware now

An AI image company that basically lived inside Discord just decided it wants to build physical gadgets.

Midjourney announced on X this Wednesday that it is officially getting into hardware. The company revealed that its new hardware division will be based in San Francisco and is actively recruiting.

What makes this wild is the company profile. Midjourney reportedly generates more than $200 million in annual revenue with zero venture capital backing, all while keeping its head count under 100 people. A tiny, wildly profitable software outfit diving into atoms sounds risky, but looking under the hood, the pieces have been moving for months.

No pendants allowed, Vision Pro veteran on board

Back in February, Midjourney quietly hired Ahmad Abbas. His resume includes a stint at Neuralink and five years as a hardware engineering manager at Apple working on the Vision Pro headset. His LinkedIn profile now lists him as Head of Hardware at Midjourney.

CEO David Holz is no hardware stranger either. Before founding Midjourney, he co-founded Leap Motion, the gesture-tracking peripheral company, where he served as CTO. As it turns out, Abbas and Holz previously worked together at Leap Motion.

Midjourney has not revealed what kind of device it is building, but it made one thing crystal clear on X. The company explicitly posted that the gadget is not gonna be a pendant, taking an obvious swipe at recent failed AI pins and wearable necklaces that flopped hard this year.

The 3D breadcrumbs

While the company continues to fight copyright lawsuits in court, Holz has repeatedly stated that Midjourney is developing video and 3D generation models.

Pairing a Vision Pro hardware lead with Leap Motion gesture expertise and next-generation 3D generative AI paints a pretty specific picture. It is very unlikely to be an ambient audio badge. Instead, it looks much closer to an interactive creative display, a spatial input tool, or some dedicated canvas for digital artists.

Why it matters

Midjourney is one of the very few AI startups that can actually afford this gamble. Because it took zero VC cash and generates massive cash flow, it does not have to ship a rushed, half-baked gadget just to show traction for a Series B pitch deck.

We think distancing themselves from the AI pendant wave right out of the gate is brilliant. Devices like the Humane AI Pin failed because they tried to turn generic chat models into wearable life coaches nobody asked for. Midjourney, by contrast, has a massive, paying user base of visual creators who would kill for better physical input and real-time generation workflows.

Still, hardware is notoriously brutal. Supply chain logistics, component yields, and manufacturing cycles have killed far bigger companies, and Leap Motion itself had plenty of distribution hurdles back in the day. For a team of under 100 people, taking on physical manufacturing is their biggest gamble yet, but it might just show what a purpose-built AI device is actually supposed to look like.