Butterfly's $74 million Midjourney license rests on a scanner with no FDA clearance and no AI

A bath, a ring of chips, a 20-minute wait

Midjourney's first hardware product lowers a person into warm water and passes them through a ring of 40 ultrasound chips, every one of them made by Butterfly Network ¹². The pitch is a full-body 3D scan in 60 seconds, "dolphins using echolocation" for humans ¹². The prototype that exists takes about 20 minutes, has scanned roughly a dozen people, and, by founder David Holz's own account, carries no AI in its imaging pipeline yet↗ ¹³.

The licensor collects either way

Butterfly put the deal in a Form 8-K on 17 November 2025↗: up to $74 million in payments over five years, on terms reported at $15 million upfront plus $10 million a year ³⁴. The cash is already landing. Q2 2026 revenue hit a record $32.6 million↗, up 39 percent, gross margin rose to 71.4 percent from 63.7, and Butterfly said US growth came primarily from Embedded licensing, Midjourney included, before it raised full-year guidance to $119 million to $123 million ⁵.

Wellness by design, not by accident

The scanner sells "body composition maps," a wellness label that keeps it outside FDA diagnostic clearance for now ¹²³. William Blair analyst Andrew Brackmann named the open questions the same week: how fast diagnostic clearance could come, who reimburses a scan, and whether routine whole-body scanning has shown any utility at all ⁷. Reviews of whole-body MRI screening find incidental findings in 20 to 40 percent of scans, and only 5 to 15 percent of those need treatment ³.

The chip is earning elsewhere

On 1 October, Mendaera's FDA-cleared Focalist robot became the first Butterfly Embedded partner to reach the market↗, running a customized iQ3 probe ⁸. Embedded revenue reached $10.8 million in Q2, up 439 percent year over year, company-reported ⁹. Needham opened coverage on 22 September at Buy with a $10 target, and the stock jumped 22 percent to $9.93; it traded at $8.93 on 1 October ¹⁰¹¹⁹.

The 2028 footnote

Midjourney's roadmap has a third-generation scanner in 2028 running silicon of its own design rather than Butterfly's licensed chips ³. Butterfly's own release says future generations will use "substantially more" modules ⁴. Butterfly is being paid $74 million to supply a customer whose roadmap ends with supplying itself. Meanwhile officer Megan Carlson filed her fourth Form 144 since July on 2 October↗, 10,114 shares for $88,447.94, taking her notices to about 134,000 shares and $1.06 million, most of it covering tax on vesting ¹².

What decides it

Three readings settle the argument: the body count through the scanner, Q3 revenue against a $26 million to $30 million guide ⁵, and the next 8-K milestone from Midjourney. A dozen bodies is a demo. Ten thousand is a business.