Midjourney Buys Astrology App Co-Star and Its 4.3M Users in a Puzzling Pivot

Midjourney just made its weirdest move yet. The AI lab synonymous with Discord-based image generation has acquired Co-Star, the astrology app with about 4.3 million monthly active users that blends AI and human writers to serve up birth charts and horoscopes. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the entire two-dozen-person Co-Star team is now part of Midjourney.

On the surface, this looks like an identity crisis. This is a company that built its reputation on photorealistic AI art, yet it has no stand-alone consumer app. You still access Midjourney through a Discord server. Meanwhile, the lab has teased ambitions for a medical device division and even a physical spa. An astrology app fits that pattern of throwing ideas at the wall, but it also raises a genuine question: is Midjourney building a product ecosystem or just collecting oddball assets?

The most practical read is that Midjourney finally bought itself a consumer app development team. Co-Star’s crew has real experience shipping a polished, sticky mobile product to millions. That’s a muscle Midjourney has never flexed publicly. David Holz, Midjourney’s founder, might see Co-Star’s AI-augmented content pipeline—mixing machine-generated text with human editorial oversight—as a template for what a Midjourney consumer app could look like.

I’m skeptical that astrology is the killer use case here. The overlap between people generating surreal concept art on Discord and people checking their moon signs isn’t exactly obvious. But if this acquisition is really a talent grab dressed up as a content play, it might be a clever shortcut to finally shipping something you can download from an app store. If it’s not, Midjourney just bought a vibes-based business that has nothing to do with its core. Either way, it’s the strangest AI acquisition so far this year.