Midjourney acquires astrology app Co-Star, its first-ever acquisition

Midjourney has made its first acquisition, buying the astrology app Co-Star and installing its CEO, Banu Guler, as Midjourney's new Chief Design Officer.

What's new

Midjourney announced the deal on its updates blog on July 23, 2026: "So this is why we're announcing our first acquisition today which is: Co–Star." The company was explicit that Co-Star itself isn't being folded into Midjourney's product or absorbed into its roadmap — it stays a standalone app under its founder's direction: "Co–Star itself is a wonderful project, and it will remain entirely under Banu's control and direction." What Midjourney is really buying is Guler's leadership: she takes on a company-wide design role at Midjourney, described in the announcement as having "radically expanded resources and teams to help us going forward on all of our projects."

Co-Star, known for its blunt, algorithmically-and-human-written astrology readings built on users' birth charts, has built a large, loyal mobile audience — reporting from TechCrunch and Bloomberg put its monthly active users in the low single-digit millions, with its roughly two-dozen-person team joining Midjourney as part of the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Context

Midjourney has spent its history as a single-product company — an image generator, largely distributed through Discord and its own web app — while rivals like OpenAI and Google folded image and video generation into sprawling consumer app ecosystems. That's been changing this year: Midjourney has been building out a broader suite of first-party apps, and outside reporting frames the Co-Star deal as part of that push, alongside work on a standalone image-generation app outside of Discord.

Acquiring a consumer app with its own design and product culture — rather than just hiring engineers — is also a signal about what Midjourney thinks it's missing: distribution and product design chops for consumer-facing software, as opposed to model quality, which has been Midjourney's traditional strength.

Why it matters

For a company that has largely built its reputation on model output quality inside a narrow surface area, bringing in outside product and design leadership through an acquisition — rather than growing it internally — is a notable strategic pivot. It suggests Midjourney sees its next competitive battleground as consumer product experience, not just image fidelity, as the field of AI image and video generators gets more crowded and commoditized. Handing Guler influence over "all of our projects" rather than a narrow astrology vertical also indicates Midjourney is thinking about a portfolio of consumer apps, not a single flagship product — a meaningful shift for a company that has stayed intentionally small and focused since its founding.