Stilla

AI Agents · Enterprise Software · Messaging Commerce

Acquisition

Meta acquires Swedish AI startup Stilla eight months after its launch

Meta says it wants the team for WhatsApp merchant chatbots, a different product than the internal workplace agent Stilla actually sold customers.

• Meta has acquired Stockholm-based AI startup Stilla, folding its team and technology into Meta Business Agent just eight months after Stilla emerged from stealth.
• Founded in 2024 by former Shopify executives Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, Stilla built a 'multiplayer AI' agent that plugs into Slack, GitHub, Linear and Notion to give teams shared, permissioned memory.
• Stilla left stealth in January 2026 with $5 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, backed by angels including Shopify president Harley Finkelstein and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.
• Meta Business Agent, launched in June 2026 to automate merchant chats on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, is already used by more than 1 million businesses.
• Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
• Meta's stated rationale centers on merchant messaging, not the internal workplace agent Stilla actually sold, leaving the fate of existing Stilla deployments unclear despite the founders' continuity promise.
• Meta plans to expand its presence in Sweden following the deal, deepening its foothold in the market that produced the startup.
• The acqui-hire shows Meta buying agent-building talent, not scale, as it races to make AI chatbots the commercial layer connecting its billion-plus messaging users to merchants.