Midjourney's hardware: AI+AR+Hardware
Plus Vanta crossed $100M ARR in less than 5 years...
It seems hardware is experiencing a renaissance.
First the Rabbit R1, your pocket companion, has sold 50,000 units priced at $199 in just 5 days. That's $10M worth of pre-orders in less than a week as a startup.
Then the Vision Pro, Apple’s latest artwork, sparked various ways for people to play shared on social media.
Now is Midjourney, it is also building hardware, not one but many. From a LinkedIn profile, Ahmad Abbas has already joined Midjourney as the company’s head of Hardware.
He previous was a key player from Apple’s Vidion Pro Team. And a principle hardware engineer from Leap Motion for about 4 years, which founded by Midjourney’s CEO David Holz before he founded Midjourney.
That means Ahmad and David Holz have history together, and they both have serious experience in hardware.
What dose the hardware look like?
In early January 2024, Nick St. Pierre posted a tweet that Midjourney have already formed a hardware team to build hardware during its office hours.
It was described as an “orb” which confirmed by David Holz, and the hardware team is currently focused on collecting 3D data:
Midjourney is building hardware. In office hours yesterday they mentioned a newly formed hardware team that is currently focused on collecting data for 3D.
But in the future, they said they may enter the realm of personal computing a device that enables anyone to organize and manage tens of thousands of virtual 3D spaces.
It was described as an "orb".
It is hard to know the details right now, but we can imagine GenAI and VR to be part of them.
In 1st Jan, Nick St. Pierre tweeted that Midjourney is doing a lot of hardware projects rather than one this year.
What’s more, they're already training their own video model next month and will be releasing video as a feature.
Midjourney is becoming a consumer hardware company some day.
Vanta crossed $100M ARR
Vanta is an automated security and compliance platform that helps businesses streamline the process of obtaining and maintaining various certifications such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI, and GDPR compliance.
It just crossed $100M ARR in less than 5 years, now serving over 7,000 customers, and adding ~900 customers per quarter.
Vanta has expanded its international presence, with almost 1 in 4 customers now based outside of the U.S.