AI Lab Midjourney Eyes Suite of Apps After Buying Astrology Startup Co-Star

The Midjourney logo on a smartphone.

Artificial intelligence lab Midjourney Inc. has bought the popular astrology app Co-Star and is building its first standalone image-generation app, the startup’s latest moves to push into new business areas after promising an ambitious expansion last month.

Co-Star uses birth charts and a combination of AI and human writing to offer personalized advice and assess compatibility between the user and any friends they add. The free app, which offers some paid features, has about 4.3 million monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower data. The previously unreported acquisition closed this spring, Midjourney said. It declined to disclose financial terms.

Midjourney, best known for offering a generative AI subscription service that lets customers create images and video clips, surprised the industry last month by announcing it’s working on a “full-body ultrasound machine” that will eventually be installed in spa locations. That device is one of eight projects the San Francisco-based startup is currently focused on, split between four hardware and four software initiatives, it said at the time. The Co-Star acquisition is just one part of the company’s plan to reimagine itself.

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Tying together Midjourney’s increasingly eclectic range of projects is “this humanistic theme across everything,” founder and Chief Executive Officer David Holz said in an interview.

All of Co-Star’s two dozen employees have joined Midjourney, including founder and Chief Executive Officer Banu Guler, who now holds the title of chief design officer. Guler will continue to oversee the astrology app, which will remain independent of other products, she said in the same interview. She also is building a new team within Midjourney that unifies design, product and front-end engineering work across all its projects over the next six to 12 months, she added.

The AI lab has faced stiff competition from a long list of startups and large tech firms, including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Adobe Inc., Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. Currently, Midjourney offers its image tools not through a standalone application, but through a website and Discord server. It plans to lean on Guler and her team’s expertise in mobile apps and design across its consumer projects, including a series of new apps focused on people’s creative processes, Holz said.

To start, Holz said the company is planning to introduce an image creation app based on the generative AI technology it’s best known for, before expanding into other uses like storytelling with images and video or creating virtual worlds. The research lab is also working on a new AI video model, he said.

“Something that we’re talking a lot about is, as we build the more advanced video models, what is a really fun and nice way to actually make stories?” Holz said of the future tools. While OpenAI’s now-defunct Sora app tried to make video generation more accessible by letting users create TikTok-style clips with a single text prompt, “it’s not really storytelling, per se,” he added.

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Midjourney may learn from the social aspect of Co-Star’s compatibility reports and include features such as letting users create images with others or find people with similar creative pursuits, according to both Holz and Guler. “There’s always been a lot of opportunity for doing stuff like this, but we never really had a team to do it before,” Holz said.

Co-Star, which has been profitable, may expand into the online dating space, Guler said without providing more details. The app currently shows compatibility metrics for users only if they have manually added each other as friends. It is not designed to match strangers based on how compatible they are, despite that being a popular user request, Guler said.

“Strangers will really throw a wrench in that feeling of intimacy and it’s really built to feel like you’re sitting in your living room on your couch with your best friend,” she said. “That said, we do have some thoughts about dating, which maybe you’ll hear about soon.”