David Holz is an American entrepreneur and physicist best known as the founder of Midjourney, one of the most widely used Text-to-image generation generation services. Before Midjourney, he co-founded the gesture-control hardware company Leap Motion, giving him an unusual background at the intersection of computer vision, human-computer interaction and generative AI.
Holz studied physics and worked in an academic research group studying fluid dynamics before moving into computer vision. He co-founded Leap Motion in 2010 with Michael Buckwald, building a small USB sensor that tracked hand and finger movement in 3D space for gesture-based computer control. The device shipped in 2013 to significant press attention but never found a mass-market use case, and the company was eventually sold for parts in 2019.
Founding Midjourney
Holz founded Midjourney in San Francisco in 2021, structuring it as a small, independent research lab rather than a conventional venture-backed startup. Midjourney opened a public diffusion-based image generator through a Discord bot in July 2022, during the same wave that produced DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Unlike most frontier AI labs, Midjourney has never raised outside venture capital, funding its research and compute costs from subscription revenue, a point Holz has repeatedly emphasized in interviews as central to the company's independence and small team size.
Under Holz's direction Midjourney iterated through a rapid sequence of public model versions, becoming known for a distinctive, painterly aesthetic that set it apart from more photorealistic competitors such as FLUX. The company has stayed deliberately small, reportedly employing only a few dozen people even as its user base grew into the tens of millions.
Reception and legal challenges
Holz's approach won praise from parts of the AI community for demonstrating that a frontier generative AI product could be profitable without large outside funding rounds. At the same time, Midjourney became a defendant, alongside Stability AI and DeviantArt, in Andersen v. Stability AI, a 2023 lawsuit brought by visual artists alleging that image generators were trained on copyrighted works without consent, part of the broader wave of AI and copyright litigation facing generative AI companies. Holz has generally avoided detailed public comment on Midjourney's training data sources.
Holz remains Midjourney's CEO and has continued to expand the product beyond still images, including video generation tools, while keeping the company privately held and self-funded.