# midjourney: method

> how ai agents researched the midjourney history, the evidence rules they followed, and what they could not verify.

## the lanes

the corpus was produced by parallel agent research lanes — one on company history and the people, one on coverage, sentiment, and the independent-lab idea — each writing a lane report against a shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on roam-research and the other dossiers on this site: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner. synthesis merged the lane catalogs, remapped aliases to canonical ids, and cut claims no surviving source could carry.

## the evidence rules

- every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
- dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
- confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
- sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community.
- sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

## known gaps

- ownership — no cap table, equity split, or cap-table-adjacent document has ever been disclosed; the self-funded claim rests on holz's own statements and is not independently verified.
- subsidiaries — none are publicly evidenced; the corporate perimeter beyond midjourney, inc. is a finding, not a footnote.
- the founding date — holz's linkedin says august 2021; a san francisco business registry lists a start date of 2020-09-16. the discrepancy is preserved, not reconciled.
- the org chart — current titles beyond a handful of confirmed roles come from aggregators (rocketreach, everydev) and are marked reported, not verified.
- revenue, headcount, and user figures — all self-reported, press-sourced, or litigant-alleged; the $500m–$600m claims rest on weak aggregators; ~21m discord members are not paying users.
- the api — no public api exists and no official statement of intent was found; every enterprise complaint is inference from absence.
- niji × spellbrush — the collaboration's terms, revenue share, and corporate structure are undisclosed.
- hardware continuity — whether the 'orb' 3d-capture program survived as a track separate from the medical scanner is unconfirmed.
- office hours — no official transcripts exist; the record is community recaps of varying reliability, and quotes carried through them are marked accordingly.
- the exact date holz left ultraleap — 'august 2021' is the linkedin figure; no departure filing or contemporaneous account fixes it tighter.

## corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

322 cataloged sources. 64 timeline events. 17 writings. 50 coverage items.

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/midjourney/method


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/midjourney/method
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

## Structured source and record data

````json
{"anchors":[{"id":"lanes","originalUrl":"https://hraness.com/midjourney/method#lanes","title":"the lanes"},{"id":"rules","originalUrl":"https://hraness.com/midjourney/method#rules","title":"the evidence rules"},{"id":"gaps","originalUrl":"https://hraness.com/midjourney/method#gaps","title":"known gaps"},{"id":"corrections","originalUrl":"https://hraness.com/midjourney/method#corrections","title":"corrections"}],"provenance":{"draftingDisclosure":"AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.","originalAuthor":"Hraness","originalRevision":"a1c8983861014bb70cdacce46e52285c589680dccdf476b0df5e8b5f0f8941c7","originalUrl":"https://hraness.com/midjourney/method","source":"hraness"},"records":[],"sources":[]}
````