Midjourney Buys Astrology App Co-Star, Bets on Human Design Instincts for Its First Native Apps

Midjourney has acquired Co-Star, the astrology app known for its blunt, data-inflected horoscopes, and installed its founder Banu Guler as the AI image generator's new chief design officer. The deal, announced Thursday, closed earlier this spring, according to reporting from TechCrunch and The Verge.

Co-Star brings roughly 4.3 million monthly active users and a team of about two dozen employees into Midjourney's fold. The free app has built a loyal following by blending human editorial judgment, NASA astronomical data, and AI-driven personalization to deliver daily horoscopes and relationship compatibility readings, a formula that turned a niche astrology product into one of the more culturally resonant consumer apps of the past several years.

The strategic logic isn't about Midjourney entering the horoscope business. Guler and her team are being brought on to help the company build its first standalone applications, starting with one focused on image generation. That's a notable shift for a company that has, until now, kept its models confined to a website and a sprawling Discord server, an interface choice that made Midjourney distinctive but also somewhat inaccessible compared to rivals with dedicated mobile and desktop apps.

Why a Design Team, Not a Model Team

Acquiring a horoscope app to level up an AI image generator might look like an odd pairing on paper, but the rationale centers on product craft rather than technology transfer. Co-Star earned its user base largely through interface design and tone, translating complex, sometimes abstract information into something that felt personal and easy to return to daily. That's precisely the challenge Midjourney faces as it tries to move beyond Discord's command-line-like prompt culture into a more approachable, mainstream app experience.

Putting Guler in the chief design officer seat suggests Midjourney sees its next phase as a design problem as much as a modeling one. The company has spent years optimizing image quality and prompt fidelity; building a native app that feels intuitive to non-technical users is a different discipline, and one Co-Star's team has direct, proven experience with.

What Happens to Co-Star

Neither TechCrunch nor The Verge's reporting indicates that Co-Star will be shut down or folded entirely into Midjourney's branding, and the acquisition appears structured around retaining the app's team and expertise rather than its astrology product line specifically. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The move also fits a broader pattern among AI labs snapping up consumer apps not for their underlying technology but for their design talent and user-experience know-how, a signal that the competitive edge in generative AI is increasingly shifting from raw model capability toward how that capability gets packaged and delivered to everyday users.