Midjourney has acquired Co-Star, the social astrology app with roughly 4.3 million monthly active users, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. Co-Star's team of about two dozen employees joins Midjourney as part of the transaction, giving the image-generation lab its first meaningful bench of consumer-app builders. The acquisition, first reported by Bloomberg, is Midjourney's most public move yet away from its core generative-media business.
Co-Star launched in 2017 and became a fixture of iOS home screens on the strength of blunt, algorithmically-generated push notifications tied to users' astrological birth charts. The app uses a mix of AI systems and human writers to produce horoscopes, compatibility readouts, and daily guidance. Users typically share their charts with friends inside the app, giving Co-Star a social graph that most horoscope products lack.
For Midjourney, the strategic logic is less about astrology than about distribution. The company remains, four years after its founding, effectively a Discord bot — there is no standalone Midjourney app on iOS or Android, and the primary way to generate an image is still to type a slash command into a chat channel. Co-Star's engineering and design team has spent nearly a decade shipping a polished native mobile product to millions of consumers.
Key facts
- 01Midjourney acquired social astrology app Co-Star; deal terms were not disclosed.
- 02Co-Star has roughly 4.3 million monthly active users and generates horoscopes using a mix of AI and human writers.
- 03Co-Star's team of about two dozen employees joins Midjourney as part of the deal.
- 04Midjourney still has no standalone app — its main surface is a Discord server — and is also building a medical arm and a spa.
That gap has become increasingly awkward as competitors expand their surface area. OpenAI ships ChatGPT as a full native app across every major platform, with image generation baked in. Google's Gemini, which recently crossed 950 million monthly users, is embedded across Android and the Google app. Midjourney's Discord-only distribution model, once a differentiator, now looks like a ceiling.
The Co-Star acquisition slots into a broader diversification push that has surprised even close observers of the company. Midjourney is building a medical arm and, separately, a physical spa concept. Adding a horoscope app to that lineup does not obviously cohere as a product roadmap, but it does share a common thread: each move takes Midjourney further from being a pure model provider and closer to being a consumer brand across multiple verticals.
The talent bet is the clearest read on the deal. Two dozen employees with proven experience shipping a viral consumer app is a meaningful acquisition in a market where consumer-AI product designers are scarce. Most of the AI industry's hiring wars have centered on researchers and infrastructure engineers; the people who know how to make a mobile app people actually open every morning are a different, thinner talent pool.
Co-Star itself is an unusual target on the numbers. 4.3 million monthly active users is respectable for a consumer app but modest against the scale Midjourney's peers operate at. The company has not disclosed revenue, though its business has historically leaned on in-app purchases for premium readings and compatibility reports. Whether Midjourney intends to keep operating Co-Star as a standalone product or fold its team into a new flagship app is unclear.
There is a plausible product story where the two fit together. Co-Star's core loop — generate a personalized artifact, share it with friends — is exactly the shape of interaction Midjourney's image models already power in Discord, just wrapped in a native mobile experience with a social graph attached. A Midjourney app that lets users generate personalized visuals and share them the way Co-Star users share charts would be a natural first product for the combined team.
The risk is coherence. A company that runs an image generator, a video generator, a medical research effort, a spa, and an astrology app is a company without an obvious center of gravity. Midjourney has historically been able to sustain that sprawl because it is privately held, profitable, and not answerable to outside investors demanding focus. That autonomy also means there is little external pressure forcing the company to explain how any of these pieces are supposed to reinforce each other.
The Co-Star deal is best read as Midjourney buying its way out of a distribution problem it has refused to solve organically. Building a consumer mobile app from scratch would take a team the company does not currently have and a design culture it has not demonstrated. Acquiring a team that has already done it, attached to a live product with millions of users, is faster. If a standalone Midjourney app ships in the next year with Co-Star's fingerprints on it, this acquisition will look cheap regardless of the price tag.
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