Midjourney just made its strangest move yet. The AI image startup has acquired Co-Star, the popular personalized astrology app, according to The Verge AI, which cited an earlier report from Bloomberg. Midjourney announced the deal on Thursday, and while the terms weren’t disclosed, the acquisition reportedly closed back in spring.
This is a company known for turning text prompts into everything from cat pictures to full-body ultrasound scans. Now it owns your daily horoscope.
What actually happened
Co-Star is a free app that delivers daily horoscopes and lets you check astrological compatibility with friends. Per its own FAQ, it blends human writing, orbital data from NASA, and AI to serve up personalized advice each day. It built a loyal following, especially among younger users, on the strength of that mix.
Here’s how the deal breaks down, according to The Verge AI:
- Co-Star stays independent-ish. Founder Banu Guler keeps running the app after the acquisition.
- Guler gets a second job. She’s also taking on the role of Midjourney’s chief design officer.
- Her team gets a new mission. Midjourney founder David Holz told Bloomberg that Guler and her team will help build the company’s first real apps, starting with one dedicated to image generation.
Why this matters
The headline is astrology, but the real story is distribution. Midjourney currently lives on the web and inside Discord. That’s a friction-heavy setup. To use it, you have to know where to go and how it works, which keeps it a tool for enthusiasts rather than the general public.
Buying Co-Star isn’t really about horoscopes. It’s about buying a team that knows how to build a polished, sticky consumer app that ordinary people open every morning. What Midjourney lacks isn’t model quality. It’s a front door. Guler’s team has shipped exactly that.
That’s the part practitioners should pay attention to. The frontier AI labs have spent the last two years competing on raw capability. This move signals a shift toward the next battleground: interface, habit, and daily engagement. Whoever owns the app people actually reach for wins, even if the underlying model is only marginally better than the competition.
The bigger pattern
Midjourney has been drifting well beyond static images for a while, moving into video and even medical-style scans. Pulling in a consumer-product team fits that trajectory. It suggests Holz wants Midjourney to be a destination, not just an engine other products plug into.
It also lands in a moment where AI companies are grabbing talent through acquisitions rather than job postings. The value here isn’t Co-Star’s horoscope database. It’s Guler as chief design officer and the crew that built a beloved app. Call it an acqui-hire with a devoted user base attached.
What stands out is the mismatch. An image-generation lab and an astrology app share almost nothing on the surface. But both live or die on how they make people feel when they open the screen. That’s design. And design is apparently what Midjourney decided it was missing.
What to expect next
Watch for Midjourney’s first standalone image-generation app. Holz named it directly as the priority, and now he has the team to build it. If it ships with the polish Co-Star is known for, Midjourney could finally break out of the Discord-and-browser niche and reach a mainstream audience.
For now, Co-Star users shouldn’t see much change. The app keeps running, the founder stays in charge, and the horoscopes keep coming. The interesting shifts will happen behind the scenes, inside Midjourney’s product roadmap.
One quiet acquisition, two very different companies, and a clear signal about where the AI race is heading. You can find the full details at the original report from The Verge AI.