Midjourney buys astrology app Co-Star in a bet on product personality

Midjourney’s latest acquisition is not a GPU cluster. It is an astrology app.

The news broke on July 24: Midjourney has acquired Co-Star, the astrology app known for its brutally blunt push notifications and about 4.3 million monthly active users. Deal terms were not disclosed, and the acquisition reportedly closed back in spring, months before it became public.

What changes for Co-Star

Co-Star’s team of roughly two dozen people joins Midjourney. According to Bloomberg, founder Banu Guler takes on a new role as Midjourney’s Chief Design Officer. The app itself keeps running, so the millions of users who open it for their daily dose of cosmic bluntness will not notice an immediate difference.

Why an image lab wants a horoscope company

The answer, in a word: design. Bloomberg reports that Midjourney is building its own consumer apps, and Co-Star is one of the few small teams that shipped an app with a voice so distinct that people screenshot its notifications and share them. That kind of product personality is exactly what most AI tools lack.

Most AI products today compete on model quality and price. Very few have a recognizable character, a tone that users would miss if it disappeared. Co-Star built an entire brand out of one: notifications so sharp they became a genre of screenshot on social media. Buying that team is a shortcut to a design sensibility that is very hard to grow inside an engineering-led lab.

The bigger read

For an AI company preparing consumer products, an acquisition like this signals where the next competitive front is. When every lab has access to strong models, the differentiator shifts to how a product feels, sounds and behaves. Midjourney appears to be buying taste, not technology.

Mercury is in retrograde; Midjourney is in acquisition mode. The more interesting question is what an AI lab should buy next: more compute, or more character?