The three most prominent text-to-image AI platforms today are DALL-E from OpenAI, Stable Diffusion from Stability AI (and other contributors), and Midjourney.

OpenAI raised $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019 and is currently in talks to raise billions more. Stability AI raised $100 million a few months ago and is already seeking to raise more.

Midjourney, by contrast, has spurned all outside funding. The company’s usage and growth have been astonishing: as of this writing, it has nearly 6 million users and substantial revenues. Yet according to its website, Midjourney remains a “small self-funded” organization with only 11 full-time team members.

Midjourney’s founder and CEO David Holz was previously the cofounder and CTO at Leap Motion, a once-high-flying virtual reality startup that raised close to $100 million in venture funding during the 2010s before crashing back down to earth and getting acquired in a fire sale. Holz’s negative experiences with his VC investors during the Leap Motion saga have allegedly convinced him not to take outside capital this time around. The many VC suitors who have sought to invest in Midjourney have so far all been rebuffed.

Yet faced with the demands of blistering growth, intensifying competition, and a massive market opportunity, we predict Holz will give in and raise a large funding round for Midjourney in 2023. Otherwise, the company risks being left behind in the generative AI gold rush that it helped usher in.

If you enjoyed this market, please check out the other 9! https://manifold.markets/group/forbes-2023-ai-predictions

This market is from Rob Toews' annual AI predictions at Forbes magazine. This market will resolve based on Rob's own self-assessed score for these predictions when he publishes his retrospective on them at the end of the year.

Since Rob resolved and graded his 2022 predictions before the end of 2022, I am setting the close date ahead of the end of the year, to (try to) avoid a situation where he posts the resolutions before the market closes. In the event that his resolution post falls in 2024, my apologies in advance. If he hasn't posted resolutions at all by February 1, 2024, I will do my best to resolve them personally, and set N/A for any questions that I can't determine with outside source data.

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Edit 2023-07-05: Last year Rob used "Right-ish" to grade some of his predictions. In cases of a similar "Right-ish" (or "Wrong-ish") answer this year, I will resolve to 75% PROB or 25% PROB, respectively. This will apply for similar language too ("mostly right", "partial credit", "in the right direction"). If he says something like "hard to say" or "some right, some wrong", or anything else that feels like a cop-out or 50% answer, I will just call that N/A.

Thanks to Henri Thunberg from this comment in requesting clarification!