How Many People Work At Midjourney 2026: Lean Team, Big Revenue

Midjourney employs roughly 40 to 165 people across its distributed team as of mid-2025, with Sacra reporting figures from 40 to 45 in its company profile and 163 in May 2025, while pulling in an estimated $500 million in annual revenue. Founder David Holz stated in August 2022 that the company was already profitable. We’re like about 10 people. We’re self-funded. We have no investors. The headcount has grown since, but staying small is the defining business choice that separates Midjourney from every venture-funded peer in generative AI.

The data below covers the headcount timeline from 11 employees in 2022 to roughly 163 in 2025, revenue per employee that crossed $5 million at peak, the bootstrap funding history, product release cadence, Discord community size, and how the team compares with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia.

Key Takeaways

• Midjourney started with about 10 people in August 2022, when founder David Holz told The Register the firm was already profitable.
• The team scaled to roughly 40 employees by the end of 2023, the year Midjourney crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
• LinkedIn-derived counts cited by Sacra and Contrary Research place the headcount at 131 in September 2024 and 163 by May 2025.
• Revenue per employee reached an estimated $5 million at the 2023 ARR mark, settling near $3.07 million at the 2025 figure of $500 million across 163 staff.
• Midjourney has raised $0 in external funding since its August 2021 founding, an outlier among generative AI firms that have collectively raised tens of billions.
• The company supports a Discord community of roughly 21 million members with under 200 employees, a community-to-staff ratio above 100,000 to 1.

Editor’s Choice

• Midjourney’s confirmed 2022 staffing figure was about 10 people, per founder David Holz’s interview with The Register in August 2022.
• The team grew to roughly 40 employees by 2023, the year revenue reached $200 million ARR, per Contrary Research.
• LinkedIn-traceable counts cited by industry analysts placed the headcount at 131 in September 2024, a roughly 1,090% increase from the 2022 base.
• Sacra and Contrary Research separately cite 163 employees for May 2025, the period when revenue crossed roughly $500 million ARR.
• Sacra’s standalone profile lists a tighter range of 40 to 45 employees, indicating that headcount estimates vary significantly across LinkedIn snapshots and analyst reports.
• The company has been headquartered in San Francisco since its founding in August 2021, operating a largely distributed workforce of fewer than 200 staff, per Wikipedia.

Sources: The Register, Sacra, Contrary Research

The variation between 40-45 and 163 reflects how analyst sources count contractors, part-time researchers, and Discord moderators differently. The mid-range estimate, roughly 100 to 165 at the 2025 mark, appears across the most rigorous secondary reporting.

Recent Developments

• April 2026: Midjourney shipped V8.1 as the current stable model, per the Midjourney version history maintained on Wikipedia.
• January 2026: Niji 7, the anime-focused specialized model, launched with the same core team handling research and product, per Wikipedia.
• June 2025: V7 became the default model and added Draft Mode plus Omni Reference, per public release notes summarized by Sacra.
• May 2025: Sacra reported revenue at roughly $500 million annual run-rate with the team at 163, marking the highest revenue-per-employee bracket on record.
• April 2025: V7 entered alpha, the first major model release since V6.1 in July 2024, demonstrating that small-team output cadence held even at the larger headcount.
• December 2024: Midjourney released Patchwork, a collaboration tool extending the product surface beyond the original image generator, per Sacra.

Midjourney Headcount Timeline

• The company was founded in August 2021 as a self-funded research lab, per Sacra. The first private demo ran in September 2021.
• Public open beta launched on July 12, 2022, per Wikipedia. By the August 2022 interview, the team was at about 10 people.
• Holz said in that interview: “We’re like about 10 people. We’re self-funded. We have no investors. We’re not really financially motivated.”
• The team grew roughly four times in 2023 to ~40 staff while revenue climbed to $200 million ARR.
• By September 2024, Sacra placed the headcount at 131, an 8.5x increase since launch over two years.
• The most recent reliable estimate is 163 in May 2025, leaving the company well under the 1,000-employee threshold typical of mid-stage AI firms.

Sources: The Register, Sacra, Contrary Research, Wikipedia

This is the slow-and-deliberate scaling pattern that distinguishes profitable bootstrapped firms from venture-backed competitors. For a wider context on AI-firm staffing, see OpenAI workforce data.

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Midjourney Revenue Per Employee

• Midjourney generated roughly $5 million per employee in 2023, calculated from the $200 million ARR figure and a team of about 40 people, per Contrary Research.
• At the $500 million revenue mark in May 2025 and 163 employees, the figure settled near $3.07 million per employee, still well above the SaaS industry median.
• Typical SaaS unicorns generate roughly $200,000 to $400,000 per employee, per Sacra-cited industry benchmarks.
• OpenAI, by comparison, runs closer to $1 million per employee at its 2024 revenue and headcount profile, per Sacra estimates.
• The math reflects two structural choices: aggressive automation of model training and inference, and a refusal to expand non-engineering roles (sales, marketing, partnerships).
• Even the 2025 trough figure of ~$3.07 million would place Midjourney among the top five revenue-per-employee firms in software history.

Key finding: According to industry analysts, Midjourney generated about five million dollars per employee at the 2023 revenue mark, calculated from $200 million ARR across about 40 staff. At the 2025 figure of $500 million across 163 employees, the figure settled near three million dollars, still well above the typical SaaS unicorn range.

Midjourney Founding Story And Team Structure

• Midjourney was founded by David Holz in August 2021, per Sacra. Holz previously co-founded Leap Motion in 2011, which Ultrahaptics acquired in May 2019 for approximately $30 million.
• The company describes itself as a “self-funded research lab” rather than a traditional startup, a phrase Holz used directly in the August 2022 Register interview.
• The original team prioritized engineers over operators, with no dedicated sales or business development staff in the early years.
• Holz framed the philosophy bluntly in the same interview: “We’re not like a startup that raises a lot of money and then isn’t sure what their product is and loses money for a long time. We’re like a self-funded research lab.”
• Per Sacra, the team operates remotely with a small core in San Francisco, where the company is registered.
• Decision-making sits with engineering and research staff rather than a layered management hierarchy, a pattern Holz attributed to keeping the team under 50 for as long as practical.

The lean structure makes Midjourney a hard comparison case for any AI firm scaling beyond a few hundred staff. SQ Magazine’s coverage of the Claude vs ChatGPT comparison data shows that Anthropic and OpenAI both crossed 1,000 employees, while Midjourney sat under 200.

Midjourney Compared To Other AI Companies

• Midjourney’s 163 employees in 2025 sit below OpenAI, Anthropic, Stability AI, and every other major generative AI firm with comparable revenue.
• OpenAI staffing is over 3,500 employees as of 2025, per its public hiring footprint, roughly 21 times Midjourney’s count for around 5 to 6 times the revenue.
• Anthropic crossed 1,000 employees in 2024 with revenue significantly below Midjourney’s run-rate at that period.
• Stability AI, often cited as Midjourney’s closest direct competitor in image generation, employed roughly 150 to 200 staff at peak before significant restructuring.
• NVIDIA, the supplier of the GPUs Midjourney runs on, employs roughly 36,000 people, per Nvidia employee count data.

Midjourney Office Locations And Remote Setup

• Midjourney’s registered headquarters sits in San Francisco, California, per Wikipedia.
• The company operates without a large central office, with most of the team working remotely, per Sacra reporting.
• No public job board lists multiple regional offices, unlike OpenAI (San Francisco, London, Tokyo) or Anthropic (San Francisco, London, Dublin).
• The remote-first model keeps overhead low and matches the bootstrap discipline that defines the company’s funding philosophy.
• Holz himself splits time between research work and product direction, with no chief operating officer or chief financial officer publicly listed.
• Engineering, research, and limited support roles make up the bulk of the staffing footprint.

The compact office presence is part of why staffing estimates vary so widely. Without a published org chart or filings, third-party counts depend on the LinkedIn signal, which under-represents non-LinkedIn users common in research-heavy teams. The remote-first pattern is increasingly common across AI firms, a trend visible in our AI agent adoption data.

Midjourney Hiring And Open Roles

• Midjourney does not maintain a traditional public careers page, per Sacra. Hiring tends to flow through direct outreach and the founder’s network.
• Open roles, when announced, focus on machine learning research, infrastructure engineering, and product engineering, with very few non-engineering posts.
• The company has not publicly disclosed sales, marketing, or business-development hiring at any meaningful scale.
• Engineering hires emphasize prior work in generative models, GPU optimization, and Discord-bot infrastructure, given that Discord remained the primary product surface through 2024.
• Holz has described the hiring philosophy as preferring small numbers of senior researchers over larger teams of generalists.
• The pattern shows up in the headcount data: roughly 30% annual growth from 131 in 2024 to 163 in 2025, a deliberate pace.

Worth noting: According to Sacra, Midjourney has raised $0 in external funding since its 2021 founding and reached profitability in August 2022, six months after its public beta. The disciplined hiring pace, roughly 30% annual growth from 131 to 163 between 2024 and 2025, kept the team small enough to preserve the bootstrap economics that define the company.

Midjourney Funding And Independence

• Midjourney has raised $0 in venture capital, seed funding, or strategic investment since its founding, per Sacra and Contrary Research.
• The company became profitable in August 2022, six months after its public beta, per Holz’s Register interview.
• Holz publicly stated: “To be honest, we’re already profitable, and we’re fine.”
• Subscription revenue from four pricing tiers funds operations and GPU costs without external capital.
• The independence stands out against competitors: OpenAI raised over $13 billion from Microsoft alone, Anthropic raised $8 billion from Amazon plus additional rounds, and Stability AI raised over $100 million before restructuring.

Midjourney Product Releases And Team Output

• The model release cadence over four years tells the lean-team story in product terms. Per Wikipedia’s Midjourney version history:
• V1 shipped in February 2022.
• V4 shipped in November 2022 with significant photorealism improvements.
• V5 entered alpha in March 2023, the period when the team scaled to about 40 staff.
• V6 entered alpha in December 2023, followed by V6.1 in July 2024.
• V7 entered alpha on April 4, 2025, became the default model in June 2025, and was followed by V8.1 in April 2026.
• Niji, the specialized anime model line, ran on a parallel cadence with Niji 7 shipping in January 2026.

The team also shipped Patchwork, a collaboration tool, in December 2024, plus a web interface alongside V6.1 in August 2024. That product surface area, expanding from one Discord bot to web, collaboration, and specialized models, came from a team that never crossed 200 staff.

Midjourney Discord Community Versus Internal Team

• Midjourney’s Discord server crossed 21 million members by May 2025, per Sacra reporting.
• The internal team at that period stood at 163 people, a community-to-staff ratio of above 128,000 to 1.
• Discord moderation, community management, and user support run through a small support team augmented by automated AI moderation systems implemented in May 2023.
• Reddit community membership reached 1.7 million by May 2025, per Contrary Research.
• The community-to-staff ratio is among the highest documented for any AI firm, evidence that Midjourney’s product solves enough of its own support burden through documentation and the Discord interface.
• For comparison, mature platform companies typically run community-to-staff ratios under 10,000 to 1.

Midjourney Subscription Tiers And Subscriber Economics

• Midjourney runs four subscription tiers funding the entire team and GPU infrastructure: Basic at $10 per month, Standard at $30 per month, Pro at $60 per month, and Mega at $120 per month, per Sacra.
• Sacra’s 2023 revenue model estimated roughly 1.4 million paying subscribers at a blended $30 per month average, supporting the $200 million ARR figure.
• At the $500 million ARR mark in May 2025, the implied paying-subscriber count likely sits between 1.4 million and 4.2 million, depending on tier mix, per Sacra-style modeling.
• The four-tier structure simplifies operations and removes any need for a sales team to negotiate custom contracts.
• Pricing has stayed stable since launch, a discipline matching the team-size philosophy: do less, do it well, charge a known price.
• Each employee, at the 2025 figure, supports roughly 8,500 to 26,000 paying subscribers, depending on the tier-mix assumption.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Midjourney went from about 10 employees in August 2022 to roughly 163 in May 2025 while crossing $500 million in annual revenue, a trajectory no major AI competitor has matched. The lean-team-versus-revenue story is the defining business narrative: roughly three million dollars per employee at the 2025 mark, about five million dollars at the 2023 peak, and $0 in external funding across the entire run. Founder David Holz declared profitability in August 2022, six months after public beta, and never reversed course toward growth-at-all-costs hiring.

The pattern benefits subscribers, who get a stable four-tier pricing structure rather than the constant churn of venture-funded competitors. It benefits Holz and the small core team, who retain full product and research direction without quarterly investor pressure. The bootstrap-and-stay-lean approach also raises questions about how generative AI firms should staff: if Midjourney can ship V8.1, Niji 7, Patchwork, and a web interface from under 200 people while supporting 21 million community members, the case for 3,500-person AI orgs deserves harder scrutiny.

Looking ahead, the staffing estimate range of 100 to 165 will likely climb as Midjourney expands into video, real-time generation, and additional specialized models. The bootstrap discipline is unlikely to break: Holz has described the lean structure as a permanent feature, not a phase. Anyone tracking AI workforce data should keep Midjourney as the lean-team benchmark when sizing competitors and estimating revenue per head across the sector.