Midjourney, Inc.
Leadership History
2 leaders · 2021 to present
David Holz is the CEO of Midjourney, in the role since 2021.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Philip Rosedale | Advisor | 2022 | Present | 4 |
| David Holz | Founder & Chief Executive Officer | 2021 | Present | 5 |
Midjourney is a small, self-funded research lab that built one of the most widely used AI image generators. It began as a Discord bot, where users could watch each other's prompts and results, and now runs mainly on midjourney.com. The company is known for stylized, high-detail images, for weekly office hours hosted by Holz, and for avoiding the venture-funding route taken by most AI rivals. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Midjourney sells subscriptions. Plans are Basic ($10/month), Standard ($30), Pro ($60) and Mega ($120), with discounts for annual billing. Each tier buys a monthly allotment of Fast GPU time; Standard and above add unlimited Relax-mode image generation, and Pro and Mega add Stealth Mode so creations stay out of the public gallery. Extra Fast hours can be bought on demand. There is no advertising and no free tier for ordinary image generation, so GPU compute and staff are the main costs set against subscription income. Usage runs through midjourney.com and the original Discord bot.
Advisor
2022 – Present
4 years (current)
Rosedale brings absolute massive expertise in creating highly complex, user-generated digital environments, advising Midjourney on how to expand beyond 2D image generation into fully immersive 3D world-building.
As an incredibly influential Board Member and Advisor (and the legendary founder of Second Life), he helps guide Midjourney's long-term vision toward the metaverse and real-time generation.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
2021 – Present
5 years (current)
Holz made the absolutely brilliant, highly contrarian decision to run the entire Midjourney product exclusively through Discord rather than building a custom web app, instantly acquiring millions of highly engaged users with zero customer acquisition cost.
As Founder and CEO, he operates the incredibly lean, highly profitable AI startup without taking any outside venture capital, maintaining absolute control over the platform's artistic direction.
Midjourney's main challenges are legal and competitive. It is a defendant in the Andersen v. Stability AI artists' class action (filed 2023) and in copyright suits filed by Disney and Universal in June 2025 and by Warner Bros. Discovery in September 2025 over images of characters such as Darth Vader, Shrek and Superman. Commercially it faces OpenAI's image generation in ChatGPT, Google's Imagen and Gemini image models, Adobe Firefly with enterprise indemnification, and open-weight models like Black Forest Labs' FLUX.
David Holz is an American entrepreneur, mathematician, and computer scientist. After studying applied mathematics and physics and working on fluid mechanics at NASA's Ames Research Center and the Max Planck Institute, Holz co-founded gesture-tracking pioneer Leap Motion in 2010, serving as CTO for over a decade before founding Midjourney in 2021.
At Leap Motion, Holz invented sub-millimeter optical hand-tracking sensors, allowing users to control digital computers and VR interfaces with natural hand gestures. Leap Motion raised over $100M, was used by millions of developers, and was acquired by Ultrahaptics (Ultraleap) in 2019.
Holz strongly believes that taking venture capital forces startups to prioritize exit multiples and predatory monetization over scientific discovery and artistry. By keeping Midjourney 100% self-funded and profitable, Holz retains complete creative freedom to pursue frontier research without investor pressure.
Holz maintains a flat organizational structure with fewer than 100 staff, comprising top applied mathematicians, diffusion model researchers, and infrastructure wizards. Engineers work without bureaucratic product managers, shipping daily model improvements directly to production.
Holz rejects the dystopian narrative that AI will replace human artists, describing Midjourney not as an automated art generator, but as an 'intellectual bicycle for the human imagination', a tool that allows anyone to visualize the thoughts and stories locked inside their mind.
Holz personally hosts the weekly Discord Office Hours, answers user queries on social channels, participates in prompt engineering challenges, and solicits direct feedback on model artifacts (such as fixing text generation and hand anatomy).
Holz believes the ultimate future of computing lies beyond 2D flat screens in real-time, interactive 3D virtual worlds. By hiring hardware leaders like Ahmad Abbas in 2024, Holz began developing custom spatial AI hardware devices capable of real-time multi-sensory generation.
Holz predicts that within the next decade, video games and animated films will not be pre-rendered or hard-coded, but generated dynamically in real time at 60+ frames per second by generative AI world models responding interactively to the player's choices.
David Holz is the founder and CEO of Midjourney. He previously co-founded motion-tracking company Leap Motion in 2010 (serving as CTO for a decade) and conducted applied math and physics research at NASA Ames. Holz rejects corporate enterprise software structures, describing Midjourney as an exploratory "engine for human imagination" designed to augment human creative faculties rather than replace artists.
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