Co — Star’s Banu Guler on Reinventing Astrology for the New Generation
Astrology has been in existence for millennia: a mixture of art and science to bring a sense of order out of apparent chaos. For the past 100 years, we’ve read our horoscopes in the backs of newspapers and magazines, excited by the concept that something beyond our comprehension could provide insight, direction, and meaning to our lives. While the interest in astrology has steadily grown in recent years, the experience has largely remained the same — until now.
Founded by Banu Guler, Ben Weitzman, and Anna Kopp, Co — Star, the first ever AI-powered astrology app, creates hyper-personalized horoscopes using NASA data, coupled with the methods of professional astrologers, to algorithmically generate insights about your personality and your future. With nearly two million downloads and over 18,000 five-star reviews in the iTunes App Store since their launch in late 2017, Co–Star has become a must-have for astrology devotees.
To learn more about this period of hypergrowth, Female Founders Fund partner Sutian Dong recently sat down with Co-Founder and CEO Banu Guler to chat about astrology as a social practice, disruption within the industry (especially with this new generation of more modern consumers), and the biggest opportunities in astrology and the occult.
Before cofounding Co–Star, you were in the fashion world at places like VFILES, Alex & Ani, and Michael Kors. What is the story behind your inspiration in starting Co–Star?
A few years ago, a friend had a baby. I designed and printed a book-length reading of the baby’s chart for the baby shower. It was black and goth, sort of meant to alienate people. But everyone loved it. That was the first moment that I realized astrology might not be something only my weirdo punk friends were into.
At the same time, my co-founders and I were working in the fashion world as astrology started to move online. Everyone we knew was using astrology to understand themselves and to connect with each other. It’s an amazing way to have honest conversations about real life.
We’d already been thinking about how to build social networks at startups like VFILES. We’ve worked at big incumbents using AI to modernize legacy products. We’ve seen and learned how to create cult-like followings for fashion brands. We thought there was a huge opportunity to use technology to make astrology accessible to the entire world.
Astrology has been around for millennia, but has had very little innovation, especially digitally. How do you think about disruption, especially with this new generation of more modern consumers?
Disruption is when a gap is closed between what already exists and what’s actually possible. From a user’s point of view, that means connecting the detailed complexity of professional tools with the accessibility of magazine horoscopes.
But we’re not just digitizing horoscopes. We’re using technology to come at meaning through ritual, self-reflection, and community itself. We’re starting from scratch, based on the sky and how people relate and connect to it. Not another app you scroll mindlessly on your phone like a Vegas slot machine. Not a better version of what someone else has already done. But really using tech to fundamentally rethink what astrology can be.
Astrology has always been complex. It’s always been social. When you’re at a party and overhear a rant about how Gemini Venus acts in love and what to watch out for, you can’t help but listen because you’re dating one, too. We make space for that complexity: how messy human emotions are and how complicated relationships can be. These experiences are hard to express, but the most interesting ideas always come from places of impossible tension.
Astrology as a market is huge — billions of dollars globally, and highly fragmented with small cash-dominant businesses. What is exciting to you about the potential to radically change this industry?
Astrology is ancient — older than any industry. It’s not surprising the field is sprawling and fragmented. Most astrologers are individual practitioners, offering services of varying degrees of quality and a high degree of woo. Bringing astrology into the modern era gives us the opportunity to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how and why it serves people in their daily lives.
Considering that we live in a time of compounding crises and future uncertainty, we see astrology as part of a broader wellness industry. It empowers people to take charge of their own lives, connect with other people in ways that feels good to them, accept both themselves for who they are and other people with their differences.
Co–Star has a very distinct voice and brand presence. What has shaped this narrative?
Astrology is so often wrapped in a corny 70s aesthetic. It goes overboard with flash, which is why the average consumer is 48 years old. It’s rarely relatable. Tech tends to use the condescending tone that one generally reserves for children. It’s functional, but it strips the experience of all magic until there’s only monotony. This is why it’s taken fashion so long to embrace digital. “I don’t care,” Miuccia Prada said. “We think that, for luxury, it’s not right. Personally, I’m not interested.” Valentino doesn’t use computers. Anna Wintour carries a flip phone.
We wanted to make something that’s closer to how we talk to our friends on couches in living rooms. Your snotty but tough older sister loves you and can’t help but be real. Images from dreams that haunt you in the morning. Our reference points are outside of tech: Seneca, Sappho, early Tumblr, ancient astrological diagrams, and goth album covers. We think of each screen as an object that people can treat as an extension of themselves.
Co–Star is now a little over a year old, and the user base has scaled exponentially. How have users found you, and how do you continue engaging them? Any fun anecdotes here?
It’s 100% word-of-mouth and organic interest — we’ve spent zero dollars on marketing. Nearly a million people checked Co–Star in the past month, and all our numbers are up 36x to 60x year over year.
We understand astrology as a fundamentally social practice, which means we’ve circumvented the most common startup sinkhole: paid spend for user acquisition. Friends invite each other, either IRL or via text, to see their compatibility. They read their chart, identify with their signs, and get excited comparing their planets to their friends’. Daily push notifications and updates instill a daily ritual of checking the app for guidance. They start using the language of astrology when talking about themselves to other people, referencing insights they gained from Co–Star. They start to prod their friends to sign up, which restarts the loop.
The record for most invites through the app (we don’t track IRL referrals) right now is 118 people, a 19-year-old in Florida. There are a bunch of random super users like this — it’s a small portion of our overall base, but reflects how the app has taken off. Typically, there’s one astronerd within her circle, and she’s the one getting everyone around her to get the app, read their charts, and functions as the astrologer for her group of friends.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities in astrology and the occult, and how are you going to take advantage of technology to scale?
Astrology — and the occult in general — offer an exit from an individualized, meaningless, and anxious existence. When you look closely at almost any real community — be it a college dorm, a religion, or a punk scene — a few patterns start to emerge. What it looks like depends on the possibility, nature, and structure of its constitutive elements. But a few boxes are ticked in every single one.
First, a shared context that allows for mutual identification and functions as a language for talking about reality. In college, you wear the same colors and cheer for the same sports teams. In religion, you go through the same initiation rites and decorate yourself with the same symbols. In astrology, it’s a shared sky, with shared events that you experience in sequence, together or individually, which gives you a language for expressing your experience of the world.
Second, shared rituals and practices. In religion, this is Sunday service, practices like prayer or meditation. In music scenes, it’s going to shows, sharing a transcendent relationship to music that lifts you out of your reality. In astrology, it’s the ritual of reading your horoscope every day. Over time, this becomes everyone going outside to look at the sky at the same time, or turning off their phones because Mercury just turned retrograde. It becomes a practice through digital communities and slowly moves IRL.
Last, a shared aesthetic that shapes identity. Modern consumerism has seized on this very well — identity has been reduced to product. Before all that, punks looked like punks and Hindus wore bindis, not for their selfies, but to express who they are. But Scorpio is a far more useful aesthetic than a cross necklace or a brand name. It says — instead of a one-size-fits-all brand — here is my personality, my weaknesses, discontents, my failures; here is my past, and here is our future. Not feeling Scorpio? Identify with your Leo moon or Cancer rising instead.
One of the most fascinating things about tech isn’t that offline experiences are being digitized, it’s that completely new paradigms are being created. When we talk about tech creating more anxiety, depression, or individuation, the solve isn’t just to get people to ditch their phones and moving to the countryside in favor of real human connection, but to think about how this incredibly powerful tool can engender even stronger connections, both online and offline.
What is your vision for Co–Star five years from now?
At the end of the day, astrology is a framework for meaningful reflection, connection, and personal growth. Unlike every other social media platform, we want to build an experience focused on elevating human mental states, not degrading them.
For thousands of years, the stars functioned as a clock. It was a system that determined when crops were planted and harvested, not distinct from astronomy until five hundred years ago. Tech allows us to adjust for the inaccuracies, by using correlative measures like weather to predict how people are actually feeling. We don’t need to know why 22-year-olds in NYC seem to get emo in January if their love lives weren’t going well in November — we just need to know about the correlation. This is the root of astrology, and with tech, it becomes infinitely more tenable.
And it needs to become even more collective, to bring people closer to each other rather than be self-absorbed in their individual practices. We have the opportunity to help people find each other, adopt shared rituals that connect them to the bigger picture, and build strong communities.
Last question: What is your sign, and what does that mean to you?
Scorpio & couldn’t you already tell? ;)
