David Holz founded Midjourney in 2021 after previously co-founding Leap Motion, a motion-sensing hardware company. Under his leadership, Midjourney built one of the most visually distinctive generative image tools on the market, choosing to remain bootstrapped and revenue-funded rather than raising traditional venture capital, a deliberate strategic choice that has kept the company's incentives and roadmap tightly aligned with its subscriber base rather than outside investors.
Holz has kept a comparatively low public profile relative to leaders of venture-backed AI labs, with Midjourney's product and community-driven Discord-based distribution serving as the company's primary public face instead.