Bringing Astrology into the 21st Century: Where AI meets India’s $12 Bn Astrology Market

Exploring how AI is modernising astrology through hyper-accurate predictions, personal context, and scalable, always-on guidance.

This week on Eximius Echo, we’re turning the spotlight to a practice that has guided lives for millennia, and is finally getting the technology it deserves. Astrology has long run on human intuition, handwritten charts, and long waits for the “right” astrologer.

That’s about to change.

As digital-first consumers demand faster, more reliable answers and platforms search for ways to scale trust, a new generation of AI-powered astrology solutions is emerging - built not on call queues, but on context. These tools don’t just replicate human consultations; they compute, recall, and translate planetary complexity into personalised, actionable guidance.

In this edition, we explore how centuries-old wisdom is becoming structured, searchable insight, why India’s deeply engaged yet under-penetrated market is ripe for disruption, and how the right teams are combining AI, personalisation, and accessibility into durable, defensible businesses.

If you’re new here, Eximius is a Pre-seed VC fund backing bold ideas in Fintech, AI/SaaS, and Consumer Tech. We use this newsletter to share insights, trends, and ideas from the sectors we’re passionate about. Let’s dive in.

Revolutionising the Traditional Science of Astrology using AI

India is a land of unmatched perspicacity. All across our history, we have spearheaded countless innovations, and answered a plethora of questions across the way. However, amongst all these, one question stands above all others - What comes next?

Around 70% of Indians believe in a defined fate and destiny. In a land divided by languages, religions, and beliefs, our love for determinism, and predicting our lives unites us. Astrology, a practice developed over millennia, has answered this question for billions of people, and helped them improve their lives. This practice has proliferated across the country with astrologers being used for both personal grievances by individuals, and to guide business prospects by large-scale incumbents.

While the biggest user-base is people aged over 35 (44% of them believing in astrology), astrology is becoming increasingly popular in the younger demographics as well with 37% of those aged 18-25 believing in the practice. As a result, the broader astrology industry is projected to grow to ~$12 billion by FY30 from ~$7 billion in FY24 growing at a CAGR of 9.4%. The penetration of astrology, however, stands under 2% due to the heavy reliance on human astrologers. Even by FY30, this segment is only expected to reach upto 9% of the overall market.

However, as consumer services around the world look to leverage AI to unlock new customers, and create better experiences, astrology must follow suit, as its implication on online penetration would be massive. Therefore, across this newsletter, we will look to understand how astrology can be brought into the 21st century, and what new companies must do elevate the industry.

The Status Quo - Online Marketplaces

The Indian online astrology landscape is already home to a multitude of incumbents like AstroTalk, InstaAstro, and Astroyogi, who’ve achieved notable scale and garnered a chunk of users. There are also a plethora of similar platforms that operate on the model of an online marketplace.

This model works on the core hook of providing users with a vast selection of astrologers who they can peruse and speak with at their leisure. As soon as a user enters the loop, they are enticed with the promise of options akin to a fair on astrology. Much like such a setup, the user can ask questions to any astrologer and look to build relationships if the astrologer can predict well. This is a potent incentive as users can select whoever they wish to speak to, and change astrologers at any point if they aren’t satisfied. These options vary in expertise, practice followed, and languages to cover a vast spectrum.

These platforms also heavily promote their services by offering new users free consultations for a limited time period, and then build confidence by speaking with astrologers. Monetization happens on a time-bound basis per conversation. Thus, the longer that a conversation goes, the greater the revenue for the platform.

This marketplace model has proven to be a massive success for companies with some players closing in on $200M in annual revenue and employing over 40,000 astrologers. However, users remain dissatisfied due to how the model is structured. Since revenue is directly tied to the length of conversations, artificially prolonging the conversation without redressing the user’s needs favours the platforms. Astrologers are also offered increased commission rates for longer conversations, thus misaligning them with the users’ interests.

Further, astrology is an extremely complicated science. Successfully predicting a user’s predicament and its resolution requires mastery over multiple postulates, techniques, and contexts. Thus, even the best of astrologers face considerable variance in their accuracy as it is nigh-impossible to compute everything with impeccable accuracy every time.

This leads to hampered accuracy in predictions, which is the most important metric in this segment. As a result, users tend to churn heavily in these platforms with only 20% of users remaining post the first month. Due to how the marketplace framework is structured, building long-term relationships and creating trust is antithetical to the business which has hampered the NPS of the space and dissuaded several users from seeking predatory consultations. This has also limited the use of online platforms, where still >2% of the users utilise them.

Thus, while this model has provided success, there is considerable progress to be made on improving the user experience. The online astrology market needs to revamp its model and leverage the power of AI across its user flows to improve the journeys. Nevertheless, the need of online platforms, and the willingness to pay have become clear.

The Way Forward

Today, AI has allowed people to build relationships that most sophisticated astrologers use today. If we were to imagine an ideal solution for the online astrology space, there would be a few key requisites:

1) Discretion - A personal 1-1 relationship

2) Reliability - As close to perfect precision as possible

3) Context - The ability to predict our past

4) Trust - A non-transactional relation

These can all be furnished to users seamlessly through the power of AI. An ideal framework would mimic how a lot of families interact with astrology - long-standing persona, relationships with astrologers who’ve been consulted by generations. This also grants people the ability to regularly access these astrologers who have context of the situation

Any new player should leverage this relationship dynamic by positioning AI as a personal astrologer who can be consulted at any time. This would enable platforms to bring the reliability that offline astrologers provide. While the online marketplace model would provide users with a plethora of options, this would really help act as a personal astro advisor that is there to be by their side when they need it. This would be driven by gaining the user’s trust by successfully highlighting their past and giving a comprehensive analysis of their current position across all subjects to build confidence. The AI would pre-empt any questions that a user might already have and put them at-ease before the consultation even begins. This would also create the foundation for a long-standing relationship between the user and the platform, improving retention and LTV (lifetime value)

Moreover, since the science of astrology is depends on several permutations and combinations of planetary positions and natal charts, the inherent computational power of LLMs will over time improve accuracy, thus rendering more precise predictions and considerably lesser variability. Moreover, with AI-led solutions, the constraints related to scaling supply (astrologers) are also easened up, allowing the platform greater flexibility when growing.

All these modules will be driven by AI, which will have the power to develop a personal 1-1 relation with each client to provide user comfort by pre-empting their grievances, and a non-transactional relationship by focussing on the user’s resolution. This would significantly improve user retention increase ARPU & LTV while also increasing margins due to no supply constraints. All this upside is also powered by improved user outcomes which would create a benign network and increase organic user acquisition.

However, if platforms focus on not utilising AI as an advisor, but just create a marketplace of AI astrologers they will lose the power that tech can today provide. While the market is rife with solutions focussing on the marketplaces model or those replicating marketplaces with AI, there are no distinguished platforms focussing on building this layer of personalisation through AI. We at Eximius are very interested in this space.

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If you are looking to build in this space, we would love to chat! Please reach out to us at pitches@eximiusvc.com.