Midjourney made its money turning text prompts into images. Now it owns an app that turns birth dates into personality readings. The AI lab has bought Co-Star — the astrology app with the famously blunt push notifications — in a deal that actually closed back in the spring and only came out last week. Neither side is saying what it cost.
The haul: 4.3 million true believers
Strictly on assets, this is a small deal. Co-Star has around 4.3 million monthly users and a staff of about two dozen. The product computes your astrological birth chart, lets you compare it with friends, and serves daily readings written by a mix of AI and humans — in a voice that swings between therapist and group-chat roast. That voice is the moat. People don't open Co-Star for the tech. They open it because it's a habit with a personality.
The real prize seems to be the people. Founder and CEO Banu Guler becomes Midjourney's Chief Design Officer, bringing her team along. Midjourney has been promising a big expansion and is building its own consumer apps — and it just hired one of mobile software's most distinctive design sensibilities by buying the company around her.
The weirdest portfolio in AI
Here's the thing: the astrology app might not even be Midjourney's strangest holding. There's also a new medical-imaging division. And floated plans for a spa. An actual, physical spa.
Scattered? Sure. But there's a reason Midjourney can operate this way: it never took venture capital. The company runs on its own revenue and answers to nobody's board, so if it wants to buy a horoscope app, it buys a horoscope app. And squint and the purchases rhyme — image generation is turning into a commodity, with every big AI company selling it cheaper each quarter. A morning ritual that 4.3 million people feel personally attached to is much harder to clone.
The part that could go wrong
Co-Star's users are famously protective of it, and the internet is a graveyard of beloved niche apps that got acquired and slowly stopped being themselves. An AI image lab is maybe the most suspicion-inducing buyer imaginable here — the surest way to kill a product that feels handmade and personal is to make it feel generated.
Then again, Co-Star was never artisanal in the way its fans might imagine. AI has been co-writing those horoscopes all along, with humans steering the tone. If the new owners leave that blend alone, most users may never feel the difference — until Midjourney ships new products with the same voice, which is presumably the whole point.
What it says about AI's next phase
Forget astrology for a second. As the underlying models converge, the scarce stuff in AI is distribution, design taste, and daily habits — everything a good consumer app owns and a benchmark can't measure. A bootstrapped lab spending its own cash on a horoscope app is a wager that the next round of AI competition is won by whoever people feel something for, not whoever tops a leaderboard.
Whether four million astrology devotees stick around under new ownership is the early test. For once, the stars will give a measurable answer.
Image: Mikhail Nilov, via Pexels
