Midjourney bought the astrology app Co-Star
The Verge Emma Roth ● Covered by 2 sources
Midjourney just bought the astrology app Co-Star. The AI image company is branching way beyond pictures now.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Emma Roth — read the original for the full story.
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Midjourney has spent the last few years known mostly for one thing: turning text prompts into striking, sometimes uncanny images. So it's a little jarring to hear the company has acquired Co-Star, the astrology app that's been sending millions of people cryptic daily horoscopes since 2017. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by Midjourney on Thursday, reportedly closed back in spring, though neither side has said what it cost.
Co-Star built its following by blending real astronomical data pulled from NASA with a distinctive, almost cold conversational style, plus a layer of AI to personalize the daily readings. It also lets friends compare birth charts to see how compatible they supposedly are, which is part of why the app spread so widely among younger users who treated it more like a social app than a fortune-telling tool.
For Midjourney, this is another step away from being just an image generator. The company has already been experimenting with video and, oddly enough, AI-generated full-body ultrasound scans, so an astrology app isn't as random a pivot as it first sounds once you see the pattern: Midjourney wants to be present in more corners of people's daily digital lives, not just the ones involving prompts and renders.
Founder David Holz framed the acquisition as a meeting of like-minded builders, saying Co-Star's founder Banu shares his interest in using AI to help people understand themselves better. No word yet on whether Co-Star will get folded into Midjourney's existing products or stay standalone, and that ambiguity is probably the most interesting part of this whole story.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I run TLDRocket precisely because I think the AI story worth watching isn't the flashy demo, it's who's quietly buying up user bases and habits, and this is a textbook example. Midjourney doesn't need astrology, it needs distribution and emotional stickiness, and Co-Star hands them both on a silver platter. I'd rather see that kind of capital go toward open, inspectable models than toward stitching AI into every corner of daily ritual, but that's not the incentive structure we've built.
Read more about this at: The Verge
