Midjourney, a company known for creating AI-generated images, has purchased Co-Star, a popular app that gives users personalized daily horoscopes. Bloomberg first reported the deal on July 24, 2026, and Midjourney confirmed it the same day on its own website (The Verge).

The deal reportedly closed in spring 2026, months before the public announcement. Financial terms were not disclosed (The Verge).

Co-Star is a free app that delivers daily horoscopes and lets users check astrological compatibility with friends. It combines human editorial judgment, data from NASA, and AI to produce personalized daily advice (The Verge). Its approach to mixing curated content with data-driven personalization has earned it a substantial consumer following since its launch.

Co-Star founder Banu Guler will remain in charge of the app after the acquisition, Midjourney founder David Holz said. Guler will also take on the role of Midjourney's chief design officer, according to Bloomberg. She and her team will help Midjourney build the company's first native mobile apps, including one dedicated to image generation (The Verge).

That last detail is the most important part of the story. Right now, Midjourney delivers its AI image tools through a web browser and through Discord, a chat platform that served as its main interface during its early growth. The company has no mobile apps of its own. Bringing in Guler's team, which built and refined a polished mobile app at Co-Star, gives Midjourney a group of experienced app designers it did not have before.

Midjourney described the acquisition as centered "around Product and Design" (Midjourney). That lines up with Guler's two roles: running Co-Star as a continuing business while also serving as chief design officer across Midjourney's broader efforts.

The company behind the deal is unusual. Midjourney is a 60-person research lab, distributed, self-funded, and community-funded. It is also working on hardware and medical projects, according to the company's own site. Those are uncommon areas for an image-generation company, and they suggest Midjourney is building toward something broader than a Discord-based image tool. The Co-Star purchase fits that pattern: acquiring a team that knows how to build consumer mobile products rather than licensing technology or hiring individual designers.

What stands out is how different the two products appear on the surface. Midjourney builds tools that generate images from text. Co-Star builds astrology content. The connection is not the subject matter but the design challenge. Both companies have to take complex underlying systems and turn them into something casual users can engage with every day. For Midjourney, that has meant chat bots and a web console. For Co-Star, it has meant a mobile app that turns planetary position data into short, shareable content. Guler's expertise is in the latter, and that is what Midjourney needs if it wants to move beyond its current distribution channels.

The decision to keep Co-Star running independently, with its founder still in charge, also says something about how Midjourney is approaching the deal. Sometimes companies buy smaller firms just to hire their staff and then shut down the product. That is not happening here. Co-Star continues. Guler adds responsibilities. Whether that dual-role structure works in practice is an open question, but it signals that Midjourney values Co-Star as both a team and an active product.

The broader context here is about keeping users coming back. Midjourney's push into native app development comes as the generative AI landscape shifts from novelty toward retention. Early adoption of image generators was driven by curiosity and experimentation. Sustained engagement requires something closer to a daily habit, and mobile apps are the standard way to build that habit. Co-Star's core product loop, a daily check-in that gives users something brief and personal, is a well-proven retention pattern. Bringing the team that built it into an image-generation company suggests Midjourney is thinking beyond model quality and toward product experience as the next competitive frontier.

For a company that has grown without venture funding and now spans image generation, hardware, and medical projects, adding a consumer mobile design lead is a concrete step toward broadening its reach. The Co-Star acquisition is small in scope, a single deal with undisclosed terms. But it brings Midjourney something it could not build from within on a short timeline: a team that has shipped and scaled a consumer mobile app.