Midjourney Acquires Co-Star to Build a Consumer Product Empire

Midjourney is acquiring Co-Star, the cult-favorite astrology app with tens of millions of users. The deal brings Co-Star founder and CEO Banu Guler into Midjourney as its new Chief Design Officer, where she will build a cross-functional design, product, and frontend team. For a company that has spent its entire existence as a pure-play image model, this is a sharp turn toward consumer product ambitions.

Two very different companies, one deal

Midjourney has never taken external funding and runs on roughly 40 to 45 employees, yet has built a $200M+ ARR business through organic growth and reinvested profits. CEO David Holz has kept the company fully independent, a rare posture in the AI industry. That financial independence is what makes this acquisition possible: Midjourney can make unconventional bets without answering to a board.

Co-Star was founded in 2017 by Banu Guler, Anna Kopp, and Ben Weitzman, and raised approximately $21 million in funding, including a $15 million Series A led by Spark Capital in April 2021. The app uses NASA-sourced astronomical data and proprietary algorithms to generate detailed astrological interpretations from a user's exact birth date, time, and location. Its minimalist design and sharp notification tone built a devoted following, particularly among Gen Z. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

Who is Banu Guler?

Before founding Co-Star, Guler spent her career building immersive tech experiences for fashion brands including Diane von Furstenberg, Michael Kors, and Ann Taylor. The idea for Co-Star came after she gifted a custom astrological chart at a baby shower and watched it anchor the entire conversation. She taught herself to code and built a product that became a cultural phenomenon. Now she joins Midjourney with a dual mandate: retain full control over the Co-Star app while leading design and product across all of Midjourney's work. That arrangement signals how seriously Midjourney is treating the hire.

Midjourney is building apps

The Co-Star deal is about Midjourney's expansion beyond image generation. Holz has said the company intends to ship eight products total, four hardware and four software, over the course of the year. One already unveiled is a full-body health scanner, demonstrated at a semi-exclusive San Francisco event, that performs a 3D scan to assess physical health. That is a striking direction for a company that helped start the AI image-generation wave.

Guler fills a gap in that roadmap. Midjourney has strong model capabilities but has operated without dedicated design and product leadership. Co-Star demonstrates exactly the skill set Midjourney lacks: it is an app people open daily, driven by an emotional connection that goes beyond utility. Building something users genuinely want to return to is a different discipline than training a model, and that is what Guler brings.

Who gains, who watches

• Midjourney gains a proven consumer product leader and a live app with a large, engaged user base to learn from.
• Banu Guler gets the resources of a $200M+ ARR company and the autonomy to keep running Co-Star independently.
• Co-Star users keep their app unchanged for now, with Guler retaining full control.
• AI consumer app competitors such as Character.AI and Replika now face Midjourney's model capabilities potentially entering their space.
• Image-generation rivals like Stability AI and Adobe Firefly face a competitor that is actively building a consumer product portfolio, not just a model.

Where this fits

Astrology apps have grown steadily, fueled by Gen Z and millennial users drawn to self-discovery and AI-driven personalization. Co-Star sits at the intersection of those trends and social connection, two areas Midjourney clearly wants to own beyond image generation.

Midjourney launched in 2022 and by 2023 was reportedly on pace for $200 million in annual revenue. It has since expanded into video generation and is now building an explicit consumer product portfolio. The Co-Star acquisition is the clearest evidence yet that Holz is building a consumer technology company, and he just hired one of the more distinctive product minds in the industry to help him do it.

No regulatory hurdles are expected given the deal's size. The Co-Star app continues operating under Guler's leadership, and Midjourney's new design team is being assembled now. The first products from that team will determine whether this combination delivers on its unusual promise.