The day after the Fall Equinox, on a rooftop in SoHo with the Manhattan skyline spread out like a spreadsheet of light, two reporters from Business Insider pulled tarot cards about their love lives. The venue, and this is the part that would make the old Wall Street men choke on their scotch, was a venture capital firm’s office. A VC office! The cathedrals of cold-eyed capital allocation, where gods are named Burn Rate and Total Addressable Market, were playing host to... astrology.
The occasion was the launch party for Lora, a social-astrology app founded by Michelle Parsons and backed at the pre-seed stage by AlleyCorp, in whose offices the whole celestial soirée was staged. And here is the thing, the actual business logic humming beneath the incense: astrology is hot in tech right now. This summer the AI company Midjourney acquired Co-Star, a leading social app for the star-inclined, and suddenly investors and the astrology-obsessed alike are asking the same breathless question. Will an AI-era app take the crown as the next big thing in the sector?
This is a space I’ve been thinking about for a long time, said Luc Ryan-Schreiber, the AlleyCorp investor who spearheads the firm’s incubation projects, Lora among them. With AI, there was an opportunity to do something a little bit more interactive.
Interactive it is. Lora lets a user commune with an AI-powered chatbot dispensing counsel on personal development, relationships, pretty much anything the heart wants examined, all keyed to the user’s astrological birth chart. The competitive twist, though, is a delightful one: the app’s biggest rivals may not be the litany of other astrology apps in the store at all, but the large language models themselves. Anybody can already feed a star chart into ChatGPT or Claude and prompt the machine for hours on end.
Parsons’s counter-move is to refuse the flattery arms race. She has said she didn’t want to ship yet another app that hands people the answers they want to hear — no sycophantic AI responses, as she put it, and no straightforward daily horoscope. Instead, Lora is meant to help people recognize patterns in their lives, in relationships or in private. And there are still humans in the loop, real live ones: astrologists, tarot readers and coaches a user can hire directly inside the app. Some of those humans were at the party.
One of them, a self-described alignment coach named Anne Benveniste, sat down with the two reporters, Grace Lett and Sydney Bradley, to read three tarot cards each had pulled. Both are single women living in New York City, so naturally, questions of love. The lesson they carried home: pain is the price of love. Somebody put that on a pitch deck.
What’s Your Big Three?
The sociology on the way up was pure 2026. In the elevator to the roof, nobody said a word — the classic New York vertical silence, observed in full — until someone cracked it open by asking the whole car for their Big Three. That’s sun, moon and rising sign. It worked like a password at a speakeasy. Instant coziness.
Inside, a manifestation board invited guests to inscribe their prayers for prosperity, love and money, and oh, what prayers: $50K monthly recurring revenue. That someone special — also $100K. No seasonal depression. The sacred and the monthly recurring, pinned side by side on the same board, which tells you more about this particular moment in American capitalism than any earnings call ever will.
A DJ blasted house music. The open bar served astrology-themed cocktails, grab-and-go: Lett took the Fixed-sign margarita with the lovers tarot card clipped to the cup, Bradley the Mutable-sign garden spritz bearing the strength card. And through it all, the people of tech talked about the stars.
When I was a VC, I’d ask founders what their star sign was.
That was Zehra Naqvi, a VC turned founder — and a Pisces, she noted — one of several startup founders circulating at the launch. There was Eric Phillips Waldstein, founder of the dating app Beyond, asked what had drawn him to the rooftop shindig: Michelle, but you know, more broadly, the universe. (A Sagittarius, for the record, and Parsons advises his company.) He added that the vibes were, in his word, better than a typical VC party.
The chatter ran through the other astrology tools people had tried, AI, the state of dating apps, the lost art of socializing in real life, the brisk end of summer. In the line for a tarot reading stood Mia Cooper, who works in tech and is a Pisces, weighing a career change and hoping for clarifying answers from the cards.
Benveniste, the alignment coach, had spent the night in the trenches of it. People are managing a lot of anxiety, she said. So many of my readings ended up in discussions around how to release uncomfortable experiences in a healthy way and create space to hear their inner compass. Anxiety, love, manifesting money — the menu, as promised. Somewhere downstairs, the spreadsheets wait. Up on the roof, the moon is in whatever it’s in, and the pre-seed money is betting that a chatbot with your birth chart can hear your inner compass better than a sycophantic free one can.