Midjourney Health Scanning Startup Leases at Union Square

Midjourney wants to open a gold-colored bathhouse in San Francisco’s Union Square to help sell full-body medical scans to spa-soaked loungers.

The locally based artificial intelligence startup leased 23,000 square feet across four floors to open the health imaging spa at 300 Grant Avenue, the San Francisco Standard reported.

The landlord and terms of the 10-year lease were not disclosed. The deal was brokered by JLL.

The building, now a showroom of diamond firm Brilliant Earth and once the home of luxury clothier Arc’teryx, opened in 2021 as one of the first new ground-up properties in Union Square in decades.

For Midjourney, launched in 2022 as a research lab and AI image-generating company, the spa will be its first plunge into medtech, by a new company division, Midjourney Medical.

Half of the floors and the basement will be reserved for the self-funded spa, expected to open late next year.

The 24/7 spa — to include cold plunges, saunas, hot tubs and amber lighting — will feature “a futuristic gold-plated bathhouse with curved surfaces, an abundance of waterfalls, and water ripples reflecting off the walls,” according to the Standard, citing renderings.

The facility will have 10 full-body scanners, similar to MRI machines, that require guests to fully submerge themselves in water to draw health data, according to Midjourney. The company didn’t disclose the cost of the scans, which don’t have FDA approval.

It said it aims to deploy 50,000 of the machines across the world over the next six years, scaling to 1 billion individual scans a year. That could require some 5,000 spa locations and at a cost of about $20 billion, according to its CEO, David Holz.

“I don’t want to feel like I’m going to a doctor’s office. I want to feel like I’m going somewhere that’s nice,” Holz said during the product announcement. “You’re going to have to get wet, but there are lots of nice situations to get wet.”

Union Square fell into a tailspin during the pandemic, when vacancy soared to 22 percent. But the luxury retail district is bouncing back.

Foot traffic in the Union Square submarket jumped 9.6 percent last month from a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s quarterly report. Vacancies, meanwhile, fell 2.8 percent.

In February, telecommunications company AT&T and fashion resale store The RealReal announced reopening in the same locations they had previously closed in 2023.

—Dana Bartholomew