Midjourney’s first-ever acquisition: choosing to buy the next astrology app—why?

Midjourney completes the company’s first-ever acquisition, buying the astrology app “Co-Star,” which has about 4.3 million monthly active users. After the deal, founder Banu Guler will still fully oversee the product, while also serving as Midjourney’s Design Lead.
(Background: Midjourney claims its full-body ultrasound scanner is comparable to MRI, but radiology experts blasted it as extremely exaggerated and without evidence.)
(Additional context: SUPERFORTUNE launched an AI Feng Shui “Eight Characters” app, targeting the $392 billion Web3-adjacent metaphysics market.)

An AI company that has never taken a single dollar from venture capital and turned from loss to profit within half a year is making its first acquisition ever—spending it on an astrology app? Midjourney officially announced the acquisition of personalized astrology app “Co-Star” on Thursday. The deal value was not disclosed.

A company that barely burns venture capital money, using M&A resources for the first time, chose neither a compute company nor a data company, but an astrology app that tells users every day, “Does today suit you to make decisions?” What strategy is behind this choice?

An astrology app that has joined an extracurricular lab

Co-Star is a free astrology app that provides daily horoscope readings and can also check synastry compatibility between friends. According to its official FAQ, it combines insights from astrologers, astronomical position data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and its own AI engine to generate personalized recommendations every day.

Midjourney founder David Holz said that after the acquisition, Co-Star founder Banu Guler will still retain full control of the company, while also serving as Midjourney’s design lead. With the team’s help, she will assist in building Midjourney’s first batch of apps.

So far, Midjourney has been working on generative AI for more than three years, and its model is still only available on the web and Discord. It has not launched its own app yet.

What’s being added isn’t a product line, but judgment

Holz’s phrasing in the official announcement makes the logic even more direct: Midjourney is expanding into “a very unusual research lab.” It starts with Midjourney Medical, which moves into medical imaging, and over the next six months there are about six other similarly ambitious projects to be released. Acquiring Co-Star is one step in this entire transformation plan—and the piece missing most from this transition, which Guler was brought in to handle, is product and design judgment.

Holz said he has known Guler for more than five years. The two often chat for several hours each week—about how people reflect and make decisions in the present, the future, and even over the past thousands of years. This reveals a key point: what Midjourney wants isn’t Co-Star’s astrology algorithm, but Guler’s understanding of “why users believe what an app tells them.”

Looking at the numbers: Co-Star has about 4.3 million monthly active users, with cumulative downloads exceeding 20 million times, and it has barely done any marketing. That matches the same script as Midjourney.