A research lab bought a horoscope app
Midjourney published a note on 23 July 2026 announcing its first acquisition: Co-Star, the social astrology app founded by Banu Guler. Bloomberg, which reported the deal, said it had closed in the spring and had not been made public before. Terms were not disclosed. Co-Star has about 4.3 million monthly active users who build astrological birth charts, share them with friends, and read horoscopes and compatibility readings written with a mix of software and people.
Roughly two dozen Co-Star staff have joined Midjourney. Guler takes on product and design across Midjourney's widening set of projects, and Midjourney says Co-Star itself stays entirely under her control and direction. Holz wrote that he needed help to expand the organisation and that the two had spoken several hours a week for five years before the deal.
The roadmap note matters more than the price
Why it matters. The sentence worth reading twice in Midjourney's own announcement is not about astrology. Holz described building what he called a very unusual research lab, said Midjourney Medical is the beginning of it, and then put both a number and a clock on what follows: half a dozen similarly ambitious projects expected within six months. In June the company announced a full-body ultrasonic scanner and a Midjourney Health division. Bloomberg reported it is also building its own standalone app rather than staying dependent on Discord.
Read as a purchase, this is a consumer-product capability bought in one piece: a team that has built and run a large app, and a leader to put in charge of product. Read as a signal, it is a vendor telling its customers where the next six months of ambition are going, and none of it is a better image model. If your studio or agency has standardised on Midjourney, the practical consequence is attention. Companies expanding on this many fronts rarely announce which line gets the engineers.
What to do before the next renewal
The bottom line. Treat this as a single-vendor dependency with a date attached. Six months from Holz's note is late January 2027, so put a review in the calendar for then and judge the vendor on what shipped for your use case, not on the announcements. Keep a second image model wired into the pipeline and test it every quarter, which is what turns a switch into a configuration change instead of a project. And export the prompt library and reference assets your team has built, because that library is the asset you own, not the subscription.
One more item for a European buyer. An AI lab now stands behind a consumer app whose core input is a person's birth date, time and place. That is personal data under the GDPR, and the company holding it has changed. If your marketing team uses Co-Star content or any Midjourney consumer surface in campaigns, settle where processing happens and who the controller is now, before it turns up in a records-of-processing entry. It is worth noting who that audience is: a Gallup survey published in April 2026 found enthusiasm for AI among Gen Z in the United States falling, with excitement down 14 points to 22 percent and anger up 9 points to 31 percent.
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