A coding company just bought a texting agent. An image generator bought a horoscope app. If you had “Midjourney acquires astrology startup” on your artificial intelligence bingo card this year, congratulations; nobody did.
Cognition Bought a Texting Agent
The two deals landed within days of each other. Cognition, the startup behind autonomous coding agent Devin, announced July 23 that it acquired Poke, an AI agent that lives inside text messages and talks less like software and more like a friend who won’t stop checking in on you. Poke exchanged more than 100 million messages in its first three months and is the only AI agent Apple has approved to run natively inside Messages, Cognition said in its announcement.
“It’s proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to,” Cognition Co-Founder Scott Wu said in the announcement. “That’s exactly how working with Devin should feel.”
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but TechCrunch reported Friday (July 24) that the deal landed in the “low nine figures.”
Midjourney Bought an Astrology App
On July 22, David Holz, founder of Midjourney, the company best known for turning text prompts into images inside a Discord server, announced in a blog post the company’s first-ever acquisition, and it wasn’t a rival image generator. It was Co-Star, the astrology app that has told roughly 4.3 million monthly users what Mercury is doing to their week.
Co-Star Founder Banu Guler is now Midjourney’s chief design officer, while Co-Star itself keeps running under her “complete control,” according to a post on social platform X.
In the blog post, Holz framed the acquisition as a talent grab more than an astrology pivot, saying he wants Guler’s team to help build “a broader organization around Product and Design.”
It’s not even Midjourney’s strangest side quest. The company is also building a full-body ultrasonic health scanner and has floated a spa concept that pairs the scanner with saunas and cold plunges.
An image generator, a body scanner and a horoscope app have nothing in common technically. What they share is a bet that people who trust you with something emotional will trust you with everything else.
OpenAI Bought a Medical Records Startup
OpenAI made a similarly unexpected move in health. In January, it acquired Torch, a startup building what its own team called “a medical memory for AI,” unifying scattered medical records, lab results and wearable data into a single profile, for a reported $100 million, TechCrunch reported Jan. 12.
The deal landed days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a feature letting users connect medical records directly to the chatbot. Torch had nothing to do with training frontier models. It had everything to do with OpenAI’s stated vision of building companions that understand and adapt to a person’s life, not just answer their questions.
None of these deals is what the company making them would have described as its core business two years ago. Cognition builds agents to write code and bought one that writes texts. Midjourney builds images and bought a horoscope. OpenAI builds the world’s most popular AI chatbot and used $100 million to acquire a health records company.
What all three share is a wager that the products people trust with something personal (a coding habit, a horoscope, a medical history) carry a kind of value no single AI lab can build from scratch, and that whoever buys their way into that trust first gets to keep it.
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