David Holz

Overview

David Holz is the founder and leader of Midjourney, a San Francisco-based independent research lab^[2]. Before Midjourney he co-founded Leap Motion, a company that built hand-tracking hardware^[1]. His career therefore runs from physical input — hardware that senses the movement of hands — to generative image models that turn a written prompt into a picture.

Background and education

Holz has said he grew up in Florida, where he ran a design business in high school while studying maths and physics^[1]. Before Leap Motion he was working towards a PhD in applied mathematics, and he spent time as a student researcher at the Max Planck Institute and at NASA Langley^[1]. That is the background he gives for his later work: formal training in mathematics and physics, research experience at scientific institutions, and early practice in design.

Leap Motion

Holz co-founded Leap Motion, which built hand-tracking hardware^[1]. Such devices let a computer follow the position and motion of a user's hands, so that a person can interact with software without touching anything. He later left the company, and at the point he departed it had about 100 employees^[1]. His next venture was Midjourney^[1].

Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab based in San Francisco, and Holz is its founder and leader^[2]. Holz has described it as a social network for creating AI-generated art from a text prompt, returning an image after about a minute of computation^[1]. Both halves of that description are worth noting. The prompt is the input: a user writes a sentence describing a picture, and the system computes an image from it. The social part is the framing: Midjourney is presented as a place where people make and share generated images together, rather than as a single piece of software that produces one picture and stops. The minute of computation is the visible cost of each request.

In August 2022 Holz described Midjourney as self-funded and profitable with about 10 staff^[1]. Speaking about the technology, he said: "I don't think the world needs more fake photos."^[1] The remark is a statement about what generated images should be used for, and it draws a line between adding to the stock of synthetic photographs and making images that do not pretend to be photographs.

Independence and the Meta deal

In August 2025, after a licensing deal with Meta, Holz said Midjourney remained independent with no outside investors^[3]. That is consistent with how he had described the lab three years earlier: self-funded, profitable, and small^[1]. The same two claims — no outside money and a very small staff — run through his public account of the company from 2022 to 2025^[1][3].

Why he matters

Holz is a useful case for understanding how the generative image field took shape. He came to it from hardware, where a product is a physical device sold to individuals, and he has run Midjourney as a small, self-funded lab rather than as a heavily financed organisation^[1][3]. Midjourney's product is described in terms of a prompt, a minute of computation and a social space for sharing results^[1], and its founder has publicly framed his interest in the medium partly as a concern about fake photos^[1]. Those are the terms on which he has presented the work.