Midjourney has acquired social astrology app Co-Star in its first announced takeover, bringing one of consumer technology’s most distinctive design teams into the artificial intelligence company as it prepares to build standalone applications.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction reportedly closed during the spring, and Co-Star’s roughly two dozen employees have joined Midjourney. Founder and chief executive Banu Guler will continue directing Co-Star while taking a second role as Midjourney’s chief design officer.
The deal gives Midjourney an experienced consumer-app organisation as the company expands beyond the image and video tools that made it one of generative AI’s best-known independent labs.
Midjourney’s First Acquisition
Midjourney founder David Holz announced the purchase on July 23, describing it as the beginning of a wider change in the company’s structure. He said Midjourney was developing into “a very unusual research lab” and expected to reveal about half a dozen ambitious projects over the following six months.
“So this is why we’re announcing our first acquisition today, which is: Co-Star,” Holz wrote.
The acquisition looks unusual only if Co-Star is viewed strictly as an astrology business. From a product perspective, it gives Midjourney a team that has already built a large, highly recognisable mobile service around personalisation, social interaction, recurring engagement and AI-generated language.
Co-Star reportedly reaches about 4.3 million monthly active users. Its app creates birth charts, daily updates, compatibility readings and personalised responses using birth information supplied by users.
Co-Star says its technology combines data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with interpretations developed by astrologers, writers and an in-house natural-language AI system. Rather than producing the same general horoscope for everyone with a particular sun sign, the app uses a person’s birth time, date and location to construct a fuller astrological chart.
Guler Takes Design Role
Guler will remain responsible for Co-Star, which Midjourney says will continue operating under her control and direction. At the same time, she will build a cross-functional design, product and front-end team serving Midjourney’s existing and future projects.
Holz said he first met Guler more than five years ago while thinking about how people reflect on their lives and make decisions. The two later began speaking regularly, sometimes for several hours a week, according to his announcement.
“I respect her insights immensely,” Holz wrote, adding that Guler and her team would help create a broader organisation around product and design.
The appointment indicates that Midjourney is acquiring more than an established app and its audience. It is also hiring a consumer product leader whose work has combined strong visual identity with algorithmic personalisation.
Co-Star’s stark interface, unusually direct writing and friend-based compatibility tools helped turn a technically complex astrology system into an app designed for frequent, casual use. Users can follow friends, compare charts and receive changing updates based on astrological movements and their previous activity inside the app.
Guler described the creative appeal of the AI lab in her own announcement, writing: “Using Midjourney feels like uncovering something subliminal and new about yourself.”
A Standalone App Push
Midjourney is now developing its first dedicated image-generation app, according to reports on the acquisition. Guler and the Co-Star team are expected to contribute to that work, addressing one of the clearest gaps in Midjourney’s consumer offering.
The company became closely associated with Discord because users originally accessed its image generator through commands inside the messaging service. Midjourney later added a web interface, but it has not built a conventional standalone mobile app comparable to those offered by several competing AI companies.
That approach helped Midjourney grow without maintaining a large consumer software operation. It also made the service less approachable for people unfamiliar with Discord, prompting syntax or iterative AI image workflows.
A dedicated app could give Midjourney more control over onboarding, creation tools, subscriptions, notifications and how users organise or share generated work. It could also help the company reach people who are interested in AI-assisted creativity but do not want to learn a workflow built around Discord channels or browser-based creation.
Co-Star has direct experience in those areas. The astrology service operates on a freemium model and says all its revenue comes from optional in-app purchases, including advanced readings, question credits and tools for adding people manually.
It also handles highly personalised outputs, social connections and repeat daily usage. Those capabilities are relevant to an AI company trying to turn powerful generation models into consumer products that people return to regularly rather than use only for occasional experiments.
More Than Image Generation
The purchase arrives as Midjourney broadens its identity beyond generative artwork. Holz’s announcement pointed to Midjourney Medical, a newer research initiative involving medical imaging, as an early example of the company’s wider ambitions.
He said the next stage would resemble the “slow blossoming” of a research lab rather than a straightforward expansion of one image-generation product. Holz acknowledged the scale of the effort, calling the moment “exciting, and scary” and saying he needed help to develop the organisation.
Co-Star therefore fits into a larger push to strengthen Midjourney’s product and design capacity while the company explores new fields. It does not necessarily signal that astrology features will be inserted into Midjourney’s existing image models.
The clearer connection is Guler’s experience translating technical systems and large quantities of personalised information into a consumer experience with a distinct voice. Co-Star combines structured astronomical data, human-written interpretations and automated language generation inside an interface designed for people without technical or astrological expertise.
That capability is becoming increasingly important across the AI industry. Model quality remains central, but consumer services are also competing through interface design, personalisation, sharing features and the ease with which users can move from an idea to a useful result.
Co-Star Stays Independent
Midjourney has emphasised that Co-Star will not disappear into the acquiring company. Holz said the app would remain entirely under Guler’s direction while gaining access to substantially greater resources and larger teams.
For Co-Star users, the immediate experience may therefore remain largely unchanged. No alterations to its service, pricing or business model were announced alongside the transaction.
Co-Star currently says it does not sell personal data. The company uses birth details to generate astrology content, while behaviour within the app helps determine which updates and astrological events are shown to each person.
Keeping Co-Star operational also gives Midjourney a functioning consumer platform through which its new design organisation can continue testing personalisation, paid features and long-term engagement. It preserves an existing business while allowing the team to work across the parent company’s expanding portfolio.
A Test of Consumer Ambition
The acquisition leaves several questions unanswered, including how quickly Midjourney’s standalone app will arrive, whether it will launch first on mobile or desktop, and how closely it will resemble the company’s existing web service. No purchase price or public release schedule has been provided.
Still, the strategic direction is clearer. Midjourney is moving from a model-centred subscription service towards a broader collection of consumer and research products. Buying Co-Star gives it an established app, millions of active users and a team accustomed to making algorithmic outputs feel personal and socially relevant.
The success of the deal will not be measured by whether astrology and AI image generation appear naturally connected. It will depend on whether Co-Star’s product expertise can help Midjourney build applications that are as recognisable and engaging as the images its models already produce.
