Meta has acquired Stilla, a Stockholm-based artificial-intelligence startup, just eight months after the company launched, in a deal aimed at accelerating Meta's push into AI-driven business messaging. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Stilla, founded in 2024 by Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, builds AI agents designed to work as autonomous "teammates" inside a company — writing software, processing data and following up with people while retaining context about a team's decisions and permissions. The startup came out of stealth in January with $5 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, and Ghorbani has described the shift in how customers talked about the product as it matured.
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.
Siavash Ghorbani, Stilla co-founder
A Bet on Business Agents
The deal folds Stilla's team and technology into Meta Business Agent, the tool Meta launched in June to let brands automate customer conversations and transactions across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. Meta says more than a million businesses are now using it, part of a broader effort — branded Meta One for businesses and creators — to build revenue lines beyond the company's core advertising business.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he expects AI agents to eventually help business owners run their "whole business," from customer service to inventory and follow-up sales conversations, not just answer messages. Meta has been spending heavily to get there: the company's free cash flow fell sharply in the second quarter of 2026, a decline it has partly attributed to AI infrastructure and agent-development costs.
Stilla is the latest in a string of small, early-stage AI-agent acquisitions by large platforms this year, as companies compete to lock in talent and technology for agentic products before the market consolidates further. Meta has said it plans to expand its own presence in Sweden following the acquisition, though it has not detailed hiring or office plans.
