Midjourney makes its first-ever acquisition, buying astrology app Co-Star

Midjourney, the AI image and video generation lab, announced on July 25, 2026 that it has acquired Co-Star, the popular astrology app, marking the company's first acquisition since it was founded in 2021. Financial terms were not disclosed. According to Midjourney's announcement, the deal itself closed earlier in the year, with the company choosing to make it public now alongside a broader statement about its expansion plans.

An unusual pairing with a personal backstory

Midjourney founder David Holz wrote in the company's announcement that he first met Co-Star founder Banu Guler roughly five years ago while thinking through how people reflect on and make decisions about their lives, and that the two have talked frequently ever since. Guler will retain what Midjourney describes as complete control over Co-Star and will also join Midjourney as Chief Design Officer — a dual role that suggests the acquisition is as much about bringing her product sensibility into Midjourney's broader roadmap as it is about the astrology app itself.

What Midjourney actually gets

Co-Star has built a mobile-first audience of roughly 4.3 million monthly active users around personalized astrological readings, a habit-forming, notification-heavy product style that's structurally different from Midjourney's Discord-and-web-app generative art tools. For a company whose core product has largely lived inside Discord servers and a browser-based web app, acquiring a team with proven experience building and retaining a mobile consumer audience is arguably more valuable than the astrology content itself.

Part of a broader pivot beyond image generation

The Co-Star deal is explicitly framed as one piece of a larger strategic shift. Midjourney's announcement references Midjourney Medical — a newly disclosed division reportedly working on projects including a full-body ultrasonic scanner — and promises announcements of what Holz called "half a dozen similarly ambitious projects" over the following six months. Read together, the moves suggest Midjourney is trying to become a broader personal-technology company built around self-reflection and health, rather than remaining primarily known as an image-generation tool competing with Nano Banana Pro, Stable Diffusion, and other generative art platforms.

Why this matters for the AI industry

Midjourney has been notable in the AI industry for staying independent and reportedly profitable without the large external funding rounds that competitors like OpenAI and Stability AI have relied on. An acquisition — its first ever — signals the company is willing to spend accumulated resources to buy product and design talent rather than building every new direction in-house. It also reflects a broader pattern among AI labs of the past year: companies built around a single core model capability increasingly looking to acquire consumer-app expertise and distribution, rather than assuming a strong underlying model is sufficient to win a consumer audience on its own.

As described in Midjourney's announcement, Co-Star will continue operating as its own product for now, with further details on integration expected as Midjourney's broader roadmap of new divisions becomes public over the coming months.