Midjourney's purchase of Co-Star, the personalized astrology app, is either a signal about where AI consumer companies are heading or a genuinely strange detour. The deal, reported Thursday and attributed to earlier Bloomberg reporting, closed in spring. No financial terms were disclosed.
What Midjourney is buying
Co-Star is a free app that delivers daily horoscopes and compatibility readings, drawing on NASA data alongside human editorial input and AI to produce advice personalized to individual users. Its audience is large enough to have attracted a buyer willing to close a deal before publicly announcing it.
Midjourney, meanwhile, has covered considerable ground since it became known for generating AI images from text. Founder David Holz leads a company that has since moved into applications including full-body ultrasound scans. Co-Star's founder, Banu, was named in connection with the deal; the terms of both founders' roles post-acquisition were not disclosed.
The case for this making sense
The read-through is about daily engagement. Co-Star has what many AI products want: a user base that opens the app every single day, driven by a habitual ritual rather than a one-off prompt. Midjourney's image tools do not carry that daily-check-in dynamic. Astrology, whatever one thinks of its predictive value, has proven stickier than most consumer software categories.
There is a product logic here as well. Co-Star already uses AI to personalize its output. The infrastructure for generating tailored content at scale is the same infrastructure Midjourney has been building on the image side.
The counterargument
The counterargument is worth stating plainly. Midjourney built its reputation on a specific, demonstrable capability. Every step away from that capability requires the company to win a new credibility argument with a new user base. Astrology enthusiasts are not the same constituency as creative professionals or researchers using AI image tools, and the overlap between the two is not obvious. The risk is dilution of brand coherence, not of the technology itself.
On balance, the deal's logic is present but unproven. What's changed is Midjourney's apparent appetite for consumer applications beyond visual media. The line to watch is whether Co-Star retains its existing user base after the ownership change, because that retention will answer the coherence question faster than any announcement will.