AI image generator Midjourney buys astrology app Co-Star

Midjourney, the AI image-generation company, has acquired the personalized astrology app Co-Star. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed Thursday, closed in spring 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Co-Star team is the asset. Founder Banu Guler will continue to run Co-Star while also becoming Midjourney's first chief design officer, and her team will help build Midjourney's first standalone apps, including one dedicated to image generation. That is the real news hook: the deal is the vehicle for a shift away from Midjourney's current distribution, a hosted model on the web and a Discord bot, toward consumer apps the company itself ships.

Co-Star is a free mobile app that blends human insight, NASA data, and AI to deliver daily horoscopes and friend-compatibility features, according to The Verge. It is a consumer product with a daily habit, and a team that already ships software at scale.

The acquisition lands inside a broader pivot Midjourney has been telegraphing. In June the company released Midjourney Medical, an ultrasound-AI product. CEO David Holz has framed the deal as part of a roadmap of "half a dozen similarly ambitious projects" over the next six months. Midjourney's own announcement joked the timing was chosen because Mercury was out of retrograde.

Guler, in her own thread, positioned the move as recognition-driven design: astrology as peer-finding, and design as a discipline for products that earn that kind of attention. The Midjourney blog post on the deal runs the same line.

Co-Star's daily push is a personalized-horoscope product. Midjourney is a generative-AI lab whose models can synthesize faces, voices, and advice on demand. When the same company owns both, the line between entertainment and influence softens, and the consumer-protection question moves from "is the horoscope accurate" to "who is shaping the advice, on whose model, and with what guardrails." Guler staying in charge of Co-Star keeps the product's editorial line in the same hands, but the parent has changed.

The first app Midjourney ships will be the test: a Co-Star-shaped retention product, or a Discord-shaped prompt tool.