David Holz

Midjourney: $500M revenue, 21M+ users, bootstrapped — zero VC funding

Founder and CEO of Midjourney — the most profitable AI image generation company in the world. Built it with zero outside funding and 100 employees generating $500M+ in annual revenue. Former co-founder of Leap Motion.

AIimage-generationcreative-aibootstrapped

Builders Like This

Cristóbal Valenzuela@c_valenzuelab

Runway: $5.3B valuation, $860M raised, $315M Series E (Feb 2026)

Co-founder and CEO of Runway — the AI video company powering the next generation of filmmaking. Born in Santiago, Chile. Co-authored the latent diffusion paper that underpinned Stable Diffusion. Inked deals with major Hollywood studios.

Similar builder

Demi Guo@itsdemi

Pika: $470M valuation, $80M raised, 500K+ waitlist at launch

Co-founder and CEO of Pika — the AI video generation platform known for cinematic quality and fast iteration. Former Stanford PhD student who dropped out to build Pika. Raised $80M at a $470M valuation.

Similar builder

Amit Jain@gravicle

Luma AI: $4B+ valuation, $1.07B raised, Dream Machine used by millions

Co-founder and CEO of Luma AI — the AI video and world model company behind Dream Machine. Former Apple Vision Pro engineer. Raised $900M from Humain to build a 2GW compute cluster for next-gen world models.

Similar builder