Midjourney Acquired Astrology App Co-Star

Midjourney, the AI image generation company that has never shipped a standalone mobile app, acquired Co-Star — the blunt astrology app with 4.3 million monthly active users — in a deal that quietly closed this spring. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the real headline isn't the price: Co-Star founder Banu Guler is joining Midjourney as Chief Design Officer, tasked with building the company's first dedicated native applications. Multiple outlets including Bloomberg (first to break the news), The Verge, TechCrunch, and Gizmodo all confirmed the deal on July 24, 2026.

What's Converging

The AI tools industry is entering a maturation phase where raw model quality is no longer the primary differentiator — product experience is. For the past two years, the race was about benchmark scores and image fidelity. Now, with OpenAI, Google, and Meta all shipping capable image generators, the competitive terrain has shifted toward who can build the most intuitive consumer interface. Gizmodo noted that Google's image generation offering is "considered head and shoulders above Midjourney in AI image quality," which frames this acquisition in clearer relief: Midjourney can't win on model performance alone, so it's betting on design leadership.

This pressure extends beyond Midjourney. Across the AI industry, technical-first companies are scrambling to hire consumer UX talent. OpenAI's aggressive push into memory, voice, and agentic interfaces reflects the same dynamic. The companies that launched in 2022 and 2023 as "prompting tools" are now realizing that sustained engagement requires product depth — notifications you actually open, interfaces that feel personal, experiences worth returning to. Co-Star had all of that: the app became a cultural fixture in Gen Z and millennial social life, less for its astrological accuracy and more for its voice. Its push notifications — famously terse, sometimes harsh — were screenshot-shared far beyond the app's 4.3 million active users.

Midjourney itself has been signaling this pivot for months. TechCrunch noted the company has been experimenting in unexpected directions, including attempts to build out a medical imaging arm and what it described as a "spa" concept — moves that suggest Midjourney's founder David Holz is thinking about the company less as a single-product AI tool and more as a consumer technology platform. That kind of platform ambition requires consumer product leadership that Midjourney simply didn't have before this deal.

The Specific Development

The acquisition closed sometime in spring 2026, though news of the deal only surfaced publicly on July 24. Gizmodo confirmed the timeline directly with Midjourney over email. Neither company disclosed financial terms, and Midjourney declined to answer questions beyond pointing reporters to a blog post from Holz.

In that post, Holz described meeting Guler roughly five years ago and carrying on extended conversations with her about "the ways people reflect and make decisions both in the present, future, and over the past thousands of years." His framing positions this less as a product acquisition and more as a talent deal. Guler and her team of approximately two dozen employees are joining Midjourney to build out what Holz called "a broader organization around Product and Design." That team's consumer-app experience is precisely what Midjourney has lacked since its public debut in early 2022, when it launched exclusively through a Discord server and later added a web interface, but never shipped an iOS or Android application.

That changes now. Guler's team will lead development of Midjourney's first dedicated native apps, including a confirmed image generation application. Gizmodo also reported that Midjourney is planning an astrology-focused image generator as one of the initial products from the combined team — blending Co-Star's astrological data and editorial voice with Midjourney's image generation capabilities. Whether that means personalized AI-generated birth chart visuals or something broader isn't yet clear from available reporting, and a separate source, What's Trending, adds that Guler will maintain meaningful creative control within the new structure.

Co-Star is worth understanding on its own terms before treating it as a mere talent vehicle. Founded in 2017 by Guler, the app built a distinctly sticky product by pairing NASA ephemeris data with a combination of human astrologers and AI to generate daily horoscopes and characteristically blunt push notifications. According to Sensor Tower data cited by both TechCrunch and What's Trending, the app has approximately 4.3 million monthly active users — a figure that has held reasonably well given that earlier reporting placed peak usage above 6 million. The app is free with paid features, and its cultural footprint punches well above what raw download numbers suggest.

What's Likely Next

The clearest thing to watch in the next 30 to 90 days is whether Midjourney discloses any timeline for the native image generation app. Our read is that this deal was structured specifically to unblock a product initiative that had stalled — Midjourney has the model capability but lacked the consumer product leadership to execute a full app launch. With Guler now in the Chief Design Officer role overseeing a team with a track record of shipping and maintaining a consumer app at scale, the organizational blocker is removed. The question is how fast they can move and whether the app shows up in app stores before the end of 2026.

The deeper question is what Midjourney becomes on the other side of this. Holz's expansive framing — medical imaging, astrology, design leadership, native apps — describes a company trying to grow into a consumer AI platform rather than a single-use image tool. Whether that ambition coheres into a product story users actually find compelling is far from guaranteed. Co-Star's success was built on an extremely specific brand voice and a tight feedback loop with a particular cultural moment. Grafting that onto a company whose identity is still primarily "the Discord image bot" is a genuine product design challenge, and one that no acquisition closes on its own. The talent is now in place; the execution is the test.

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