Meta acquires Stilla, the Stockholm AI-agent startup its own customers started calling "a teammate," to power Meta Business Agent

Meta is acquiring Stilla, a Stockholm-based AI-agent startup that spent less than a year in public existence before catching the acquirer's attention, Axios reported September 9. Stilla's team and technology are folding into Meta Business Agent, the company's AI system for handling customer conversations and transactions across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram -- a product Meta says already serves more than 1 million businesses and processes over 1 billion business conversations a day. Neither company has disclosed a price.

Stilla was founded in 2024 by Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, and emerged from stealth only in January 2026 with $5 million in pre-seed funding -- a small round for a company Meta was reportedly courting within the same year. Ghorbani's prior startup, Tictail, was acquired by Shopify and became the seed for Shop and Shop Pay, giving him a specific track record in exactly the kind of technology-into-platform deal Meta is now making with Stilla. The product itself was built as a general-purpose AI teammate -- an agent that maintains shared context across a team's tools (Slack, Linear, GitHub, Notion) and can write code, analyze data, and follow up on conversations largely on its own.

The line Stilla used to describe its own product, before Meta came calling, is the detail worth keeping: "For a while we hesitated to call Stilla an AI teammate," co-founder Siavash Ghorbani has said of the product. "Then customers started sharing the work Stilla was doing autonomously and calling it their newest teammate." That's a small company's branding language, not a verified capability claim -- but it's also exactly the pitch Meta is buying, applied to a much larger surface than the enterprise teams Stilla built it for.

What Meta actually intends to build with the acquisition is still unstated beyond the product-integration framing both sides have given reporters. Stilla says its existing platform will keep operating for current customers through the transition; whether that holds once the deal closes, and whether Meta absorbs the enterprise-workflow product or strips it for parts to feed Business Agent, is the open question a small, undisclosed-price acquisition like this one doesn't answer on day one.