Midjourney Bought CoStar. Here's Who Still Gets My Chart.

What the CoStar acquisition taught me about deciding who earns a piece of you as tools get more personal.

Jul 31, 2026

Midjourney, the AI company, announced it had bought CoStar. The deal itself is old news, it closed quietly back in the spring. The announcement is what’s new, and it landed on four million people at once: CoStar has about 4.3 million monthly users.

Its founder, Banu Guler, and her team of roughly two dozen people are now part of Midjourney. Guler becomes Midjourney’s Chief Design Officer, and the company says CoStar keeps running under her direction.

I’ve spent 23 years in design and tech. I know exactly how these acquisitions work, and I know what “keeps running under her direction” actually means in the fine print. I deleted my CoStar account within the hour…and I was not alone.

Here’s the part that matters more than the horoscopes of it all

…and this is gonna get a bit techy for a minute.

Midjourney has always lived inside Discord, working through a server instead of its own app.

That setup left one gap: a direct way to collect personal data from its own users. CoStar has exactly that. Birthdates, birth times, birth locations, years of daily engagement, relationship data for every friend you’ve ever added for a compatibility check. That’s the actual asset in this deal. The horoscope copy is beside the point. Data collected once, for one purpose, is about to get used again for another.

Here’s where I landed: the more personal a tool gets, the more say you get in who’s earned that part of you. That decision doesn’t run on autopilot just because a tool is convenient, popular, or already sitting on your phone.

I want to talk about my reaction process through my Blueprint.

I felt the answer in my body before I’d built a single sentence of reasoning, Splenic authority doing exactly what it’s built to do, fast and physical, done before my mind caught up.

Happy for a female founder, concerned about CoStar being source material for AI then urge to delete it.

I posted a stories about it that same night, uninvited, unscheduled, because that’s the Manifestor part of me.

I don’t wait for permission to have a reaction. I have it and then SOMETIMES I tell you about it.

What took longer was feeling like I earned the right to publish an actual argument instead of just a feeling.

I’m a 5/1 and the Investigator half needed to get precise, on the data question, the funding question, and what I actually took issue with, before I’d stand behind any of it in writing. Putting a bold public opinion out there at all is my 10th house Aries stellium doing its job, that boldness is my natural frequency.

Underneath it is Cancer Rising, which is why the take reads sharp in public but comes from something protective underneath: this is people’s birth data, and something in me goes fiercely maternal the second that gets threatened.

The funny thing is that I actually agree with why Midjourney wanted in.

Astrology and Human Design are two of the most personalizing tools that exist for how someone runs a business, makes a decision, moves through an actual week. That’s the whole premise of my own work.

I use AI inside that work, too. I’ve used it to reformat five hundred and twenty two individual ephemeris events for my Astro Biz Calendar, a job that took a full work week by hand and two days with AI doing the reformatting, back in early ChatGPT days. I’m aiming for an afternoon for 2027’s version with Claude.

I’ve trained a knowledge base on my own analogies, ways of looking at strategy and systems and my own read of chart placements, in Human Design and astrology both, so when I build someone’s Blueprint, it hands me a first draft I finish by hand with the specificity and channeled insight only a real read gives you. Every word in that draft traces back to what I actually wrote, never to generic internet astrology.

The difference between that and what Midjourney just bought is consent.

My data is mine, and I chose to hand it to a system I built myself, for a purpose I picked. CoStar’s users never got that same choice twice.

This isn’t only an astrology story. Every app on your phone is getting more personalized, your health app, your banking app, your to-do list, all of it learning more about you by the month, which means all of it is deciding how much of you it’s earned.

Chani Nicholas built an app that stays human on purpose and says so in plain numbers: no one on the team paid under $80,000, full benefits, five percent of revenue, not just profits, going straight to survivors of gender-based violence, over $3.1 million generated for survivors so far.

CoStar built something designed to keep you opening it, push notifications timed for maximum sting, a compatibility score you can’t stop checking, a daily card vague enough to feel ominous at best and rage bait at worst. Both are personalized. One earns your trust. The other just wants your attention.

I mean their support tab should tell you something…

I’ve also downloaded nearly every astrology and Human Design app that exists, it’s part of knowing the landscape in this industry.

The landscape splits into two real categories.

Some tools are utility tools, built for people who already know how to interpret the data and read a chart themselves (Time Passages, Time Nomad, etc).
Others are built to close that gap for people who don’t (CoStar, Chani, the Pattern). CHANI is the only app I trust to close that gap with integrity.

For the utility side, I use Luna Astrology to generate charts and BodyGraph for Human Design. Plenty of others are still sitting on my phone.

I don’t want to flatten this into a clean villain story either.

Banu Guler built something four million people use a month and just sold it, and I feel that!

All-women founding teams still raise only around 2% of US venture capital. Even the more generous count, any startup with at least one female cofounder, only got women to about 27.7% of 2025 VC dollars, up from 19.9% the year before and itself a record high.

Acquisitions are worse: only about 7% of US acquisitions in 2023 went to a company with a female founder, and globally that number drops to roughly 3%.

Against those numbers, a woman-founded astrology app getting bought by a major AI lab is a rare, real win.

I love watching a woman succeed. I love that astrology, something so often dismissed as soft or unserious, just got treated like the multi-million dollar business it actually is. Discernment isn’t picking a side. It’s holding both, the real win and the real question about what it cost the people who trusted her with their data.

So here it is again: the more a tool knows about you, the more say you get in who’s earned that, and convenience is never a good enough reason to skip the question.

I’m putting together a full roundup of the astrologers and Human Design people I actually trust, coming in a future post. Drop your own favorites in the comments here, I want yours in it too.