Midjourney Buys Astrology App Co-Star, Its Founder Banu Guler Named Chief Design Officer

What happened

Midjourney, the AI image and video company founded by David Holz, has acquired Co-Star, the astrology app known for daily horoscopes and birth-chart readings, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by both Engadget and RuntimeWire. The deal closed during spring 2026, per Midjourney, though the acquisition wasn't widely reported until this week. Neither company disclosed the purchase price.

Co-Star founder Banu Guler is joining Midjourney as Chief Design Officer. Midjourney says Guler will retain "complete control" over the app, according to Engadget's reporting. Guler posted about the deal on X on July 24, framing it as an extension of her friendship with Holz and a shared belief that AI tools can "reveal our humanity to ourselves."

The numbers don't fully agree

How big is Co-Star, really? The sources don't line up cleanly. Engadget, citing Guler's own post, says Co-Star has reached "35 percent of young people in the US with tens of millions of app downloads." Startupfortune cites more than 30 million registered accounts. RuntimeWire, citing Sensor Tower data referenced by Bloomberg, puts Co-Star's monthly active users at roughly 4.3 million.

Those aren't contradictions so much as different metrics measuring different things. Downloads, registered accounts, and monthly actives are three separate numbers, and companies (and their founders) tend to lead with whichever one sounds biggest. Readers should treat the "35 percent of young people" figure as Guler's own characterization, not an independently verified stat.

What's consistent across sources: Co-Star's audience skews young. Insider reporting cited by startupfortune put the average user age at 18 to 25. The app's own App Store listing shows more than 205,000 ratings and offers a paid tier, Pro-Star, at $8.99 a month, according to startupfortune.

Why an AI image company wants an astrology app

On its face, this looks like an odd pairing. Midjourney makes money licensing AI image and video generation tools. Co-Star tells people what Mercury retrograde means for their week. But the strategic logic isn't about astrology. It's about distribution.

Midjourney has operated unusually since Holz launched it as a Discord bot in 2022. It never took outside venture funding, according to the company's own careers page, and it built a subscription business inside someone else's platform. That worked well when AI image generation felt novel. It works less well now that OpenAI, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion forks, and Flux-based tools have made basic image generation common and cheap, as startupfortune points out.

RuntimeWire reports that Midjourney is separately building its first standalone image-generation app, a move that would give the company direct control over onboarding, notifications, and payments instead of relying on Discord as a middleman. Bloomberg's reporting, per RuntimeWire, doesn't specify launch timing, platform, or pricing for that app. Co-Star gives Midjourney something it can't build from scratch quickly: a mobile-native habit and a social graph of users who already open an app daily for something personal.

Forbes has reported Midjourney's 2024 revenue at roughly $300 million, citing PitchBook data referenced by startupfortune, with a headcount around 60 people. That's a small team generating serious revenue without ads or outside investors. Buying Co-Star, rather than building a competing consumer app organically, fits a company that has consistently taken shortcuts around the standard startup playbook.

The skeptical read, and the fair concern

The strongest pushback here comes from Co-Star's own user base. Engadget flags a real tension: younger users, the same demographic Co-Star depends on, have grown measurably more skeptical of generative AI. A Gallup survey from April 2026, cited by Engadget, found Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI has dropped sharply. Strong agreement or agreement that they feel "excited" about AI fell 14 percentage points to 22%. Hopefulness dropped nine points to 18%. Anger about AI rose nine points to 31%.

That's a legitimate risk for Midjourney. Co-Star users came to the app for something that felt personal, even mystical, not for something branded as AI infrastructure. If Midjourney's ownership becomes visible in the product, folding an AI company's fingerprints onto an app whose core audience is increasingly wary of AI could backfire. Guler's insistence that she retains "complete control" over Co-Star looks, at minimum, like an attempt to keep that risk contained.

What's unresolved

Neither Bloomberg's original reporting nor the coverage built on it specifies the purchase price, how Midjourney intends to integrate Co-Star technically, or whether Co-Star will keep operating as a separate app indefinitely. It's also unclear whether Midjourney's in-development standalone image app and the Co-Star acquisition are meant to work together, or whether they're simply two separate bets on the same problem: owning the relationship with users instead of renting it from Discord or an app store algorithm.