A coding company has just purchased a text messaging proxy. The photo creator bought a horoscope app. If you had”Mid-flight “Acquires an astrology startup” on your AI bingo card this year, congratulations; No one did that.
Realization bought a texting agent
The two deals occurred within days of each other. perceptionthe startup behind the independent coding agent Devin, Announce July 23 acquired Pokean AI agent that lives inside text messages and speaks less like a program and more like a friend who won’t stop checking up on you. Poke exchanged more than 100 million messages in the first three months and is the only AI agent apple It has been approved for local operation indoors MessagesRealization said in its announcement.
“She’s proactive, she knows you, and she’s fun to talk to,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu he said in the ad. “This is exactly what working with Devin should feel like.”
Financial terms were not disclosed, per TechCrunch I mentioned Friday (July 24) that the deal had reached “low nine figures”.
Midjourney bought an astrology app
On July 22, David Woodfounder of Midjourney, a company known for converting text prompts into images within a file Sedition Server, announced in a Blog post The company’s first acquisition ever, it was not a competing image creation company. It was Co-staran astrology app that has told nearly 4.3 million people users per month What Mercury does in their week.
Co-Founder Star Beno Guler She is now Midjourney’s chief design officer, while Co-Star itself continues to operate under her “total control,” according to mail On the social media platform X.
Midjourney acquires Co-Star. CEO @banu__guler He is now Chief Design Officer at Midjourney. She’s building a cross-functional team for design, product, and the front end of all our efforts. Co-Star will continue to operate under Banus’ complete control. Hello Banu and team <3
– Mid-flight (@ mid-flight) July 24, 2026
In the blog post, Holz framed the acquisition as more of a talent magnet than a mining pivot, saying he wants the Goler 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 whole-body ultrasound machine Health scanner It proposed a spa concept that combines a scanner, saunas and cold plunge rooms.
The image generator, body scanner and horoscope app technically have nothing in common. What they have in common is a bet that people who trust you with one thing romantically will trust you with everything else.
OpenAI has bought a medical records startup
OpenAI He made a similar unexpected move in the field of health. In January, it acquired… The torcha startup that is building what its team calls “AI medical memory,” unifying scattered medical records, lab results, and wearable data into a single profile, has sold for $100 million, according to TechCrunch. I mentioned January 12.
The deal arrived days after OpenAI’s launch ChatGPT Validitya feature that allows users to link medical records directly to the chatbot. Torch had nothing to do with training the frontier models. It was about OpenAI’s stated vision of building companions who understand and adapt to a person’s life, not just answer their questions.
None of these deals are what the company making them would have described as its core business two years ago. Cognition builds agents for writing code and bought one that writes scripts. Midjourney builds images and bought your horoscope. OpenAI is building the world’s most popular chatbot, and used $100 million to acquire a health records company.
What all three have in common is the bet that products in which people trust something personal (usually programming, a horoscope, or medical history) hold the kind of value that 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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