Meta has acquired Swedish artificial intelligence startup Stilla AI , adding the young company’s team and technology to a growing push to turn AI-powered business messaging into a larger commercial product. The deal comes as Meta says its Business Agent is already being used by more than one million businesses.
Meta is putting more weight behind AI agents that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses.
The company has acquired Stilla.ai, a Swedish AI startup founded in 2024 by founded by Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, with plans to integrate its team and technology into Meta’s agentic business offerings. The move gives Meta another piece of technology and talent as it works to expand automated conversations between businesses and their customers across its messaging platforms.
The timing is notable because Meta’s Business Agent is no longer an early experiment serving a limited group of companies. Meta says the product is now used by more than one million businesses, giving the company an existing base on which to build more sophisticated AI-powered services.
Meta wants AI to handle more customer conversations
Launched in June, Meta’s Business Agent was designed to let brands automate responses to customers communicating through the direct-messaging features of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
That creates a potentially important role for AI inside products where businesses are already speaking directly with customers.
Rather than treating AI only as a consumer chatbot, Meta is attempting to build tools that businesses can use as part of their everyday operations. Automated customer conversations are one of the first areas where that strategy is becoming visible.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a much broader ambition. During the launch of Business Agent, he said that as Meta’s models improve, businesses could eventually use AI agents to help run their “whole business.”
The Stilla.ai acquisition fits neatly into that direction. By bringing the startup’s team and technology inside Meta, the company can strengthen the systems behind its agentic business products while continuing to develop services that operate across its major messaging platforms.
Stilla AI brings a young Swedish AI team into Meta
Stilla.ai is a relatively small and young company compared with Meta.
The startup was founded in 2024 and raised $5 million in pre-seed funding. The acquisition is also intended to increase Meta’s presence in Sweden.
Its size is significant in a different way. This is not presented as an acquisition of a large established software business. Instead, Meta is absorbing an early-stage AI startup while agent technology is still developing quickly.
Today, Stilla is joining Meta!
Same team, same Stilla, just with the scale to reach many more people.
When Kaj Drobin and I started Stilla, we made a bet: models would get unfathomably good, and everyone would have access to them. What would matter was what your AI knew about your team, your decisions, and what you were trying to get done.
Early on, we focused on helping teams keep track of their work and stay aligned. As the models improved, we kept expanding what Stilla could take on. In the 8 months since launch, companies have come to rely on Stilla for real work.
For a while we hesitated to call Stilla an AI teammate. We considered it a claim you’d have to earn. Then customers started sharing the work Stilla was doing autonomously and calling it their newest teammate. That meant a lot.
Today Stilla has its own computer and the context to do the kind of work you’d hand to a competent coworker. It can write software, work through data, and follow up with people. You can bring it into a conversation with your team and figure things out together.
Tictail took us to Shopify. That led to Shop and Shop Pay. Now we’re bringing Stilla to Meta and to many more people.
All thanks to this incredible team, our users, and everyone backing us. We’ve had an unreasonable amount of fun getting here. – Siavash Ghorbani, co-founder, Stilla
That makes the deal less about adding an already massive customer operation and more about strengthening Meta’s capabilities as it races to commercialize AI agents.
Business messaging is becoming part of Meta’s AI revenue strategy
Meta’s interest in business agents also sits alongside efforts to generate revenue beyond its core advertising business.
The company has been working on Meta One, a subscription offering with different plans for businesses and creators using Meta AI. Business Agent is part of that broader effort to build products businesses may eventually pay to use rather than relying only on advertising revenue.
That shift matters because developing advanced AI infrastructure is expensive.
Meta’s push into agentic systems is costing the company billions, while its Q2 2026 results showed a 91% year-over-year decline in free cash flow as it continued developing AI systems across its apps and products.
The company therefore has two parallel challenges: improve the technology quickly enough to remain competitive, and turn those investments into products businesses are willing to adopt and eventually pay for.
Business messaging offers Meta a direct route to test that commercial model.
One million businesses give Meta a head start
The most consequential number surrounding the Stilla.ai deal may not be the startup’s funding history. It is the reported adoption of Meta’s own Business Agent.
With more than one million businesses already using the product, Meta has a substantial group of companies interacting with its automated business tools. That gives the company an opportunity to introduce increasingly capable AI agents into platforms that merchants and customers already use for communication.
Meta is also operating in an increasingly competitive AI market. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are among the companies competing as AI systems move beyond question-and-answer tools toward software capable of performing tasks and acting on behalf of users or businesses. Meta is seeking merchant adoption by positioning its technology around customer conversions and messaging.
The acquisition of Stilla.ai will not determine that competition on its own. What it does show is where Meta sees an immediate commercial opportunity for its AI technology: inside the conversations already happening between businesses and customers across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
For Meta, the next phase of business messaging appears to be less about simply giving companies another inbox and more about giving that inbox an AI agent capable of doing an increasing share of the work.
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