{"id":124613,"date":"2026-07-30T17:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T17:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/124613\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T17:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T17:14:08","slug":"silicon-valleys-ai-giants-go-shopping-off-their-turf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/124613\/","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley\u2019s AI Giants Go Shopping Off Their Turf"},"content":{"rendered":"

A coding company just bought a texting agent. An image generator bought a horoscope app. If you had \u201cMidjourney<\/a> acquires astrology startup\u201d on your artificial intelligence bingo card this year, congratulations; nobody did.<\/p>\n

Cognition Bought a Texting Agent<\/p>\n

The two deals landed within days of each other. Cognition<\/a>, the startup behind autonomous coding agent Devin<\/a>, announced<\/a> July 23 that it acquired Poke<\/a>, an AI agent that lives inside text messages and talks less like software and more like a friend who won\u2019t stop checking in on you. Poke exchanged more than 100 million messages in its first three months and is the only AI agent Apple<\/a> has approved to run natively inside Messages<\/a>, Cognition said in its announcement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s proactive, it knows you, and it\u2019s fun to talk to,\u201d Cognition Co-Founder Scott Wu<\/a> said in the announcement. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly how working with Devin should feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Financial terms weren\u2019t disclosed, but TechCrunch reported<\/a> Friday (July 24) that the deal landed in the \u201clow nine figures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Midjourney Bought an Astrology App<\/p>\n

On July 22, David Holz<\/a>, founder of Midjourney, the company best known for turning text prompts into images inside a Discord<\/a> server, announced in a blog post<\/a> the company\u2019s first-ever acquisition, and it wasn\u2019t a rival image generator. It was Co-Star<\/a>, the astrology app that has told roughly 4.3 million monthly users<\/a> what Mercury is doing to their week.<\/p>\n

Co-Star Founder Banu Guler<\/a> is now Midjourney\u2019s chief design officer, while Co-Star itself keeps running under her \u201ccomplete control,\u201d according to a post<\/a> on social platform X.<\/p>\n

Midjourney is acquiring Co-Star. CEO @banu__guler<\/a> is now Chief Design Officer at Midjourney. She\u2019s building a cross-functional design, product and frontend team for all our efforts. The Co-Star app will continue to operate under Banus complete control. Welcome Banu and team <3<\/p>\n

\u2014 Midjourney (@midjourney) July 24, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

In the blog post, Holz framed the acquisition as a talent grab more than an astrology pivot, saying he wants Guler\u2019s team to help build \u201ca broader organization around Product and Design.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not even Midjourney\u2019s strangest side quest. The company is also building a full-body ultrasonic health scanner<\/a> and has floated a spa concept that pairs the scanner with saunas and cold plunges.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

OpenAI Bought a Medical Records Startup<\/p>\n

OpenAI<\/a> made a similarly unexpected move in health. In January, it acquired Torch<\/a>, a startup building what its own team called \u201ca medical memory for AI,\u201d unifying scattered medical records, lab results and wearable data into a single profile, for a reported $100 million, TechCrunch reported<\/a> Jan. 12.<\/p>\n

The deal landed days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health<\/a>, 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\u2019s stated vision of building companions that understand and adapt to a person\u2019s life, not just answer their questions.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s most popular AI chatbot and used $100 million to acquire a health records company.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A coding company just bought a texting agent. An image generator bought a horoscope app. If you had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1911,24,25,66,157,310,1162],"class_list":["post-124613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-acquisitions","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-news","tag-openai","tag-pymnts-news","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}