Key points
- Axios reports Meta agreed to buy Stockholm startup Stilla
- Deal is meant to speed up Meta Business Agent
- No price was disclosed, and neither company has confirmed the deal
- Stilla raised $5 million in January from General Catalyst
Meta (META) has agreed to buy Swedish AI startup Stilla to accelerate development of Meta Business Agent, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing a source familiar with the deal. No price was disclosed. Meta has not announced the acquisition, and Stilla did not respond to Axios's request for comment.
Business Agent answers customer questions and helps merchants sell through WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. Stilla's team and technology will join Meta after the deal closes, and Meta reportedly plans to expand its presence in Sweden.
Founded in Stockholm in 2024, Stilla emerged from stealth on January 20 with $5 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, Tech.eu reported. Its angel investors included the founders of Shopify, ElevenLabs and Hugging Face, according to Swedish Tech News. Breakit reported that the startup was valued at nearly 400 million kronor, or about $42 million, before its launch.
Stilla's founders help explain why the startup attracted Meta. Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin started Tictail, a Swedish online store builder that Shopify (SHOP) bought in 2018. At Shopify they went on to build Shop, the consumer shopping app, and Shop Pay, its one-click checkout. Stilla's product is an AI teammate that connects to a company's tools, such as Slack, GitHub and Linear, and keeps track of what people are working on and what was decided. Early customers included Spotify and Ramp, Tech.eu reported. Ghorbani said at the launch, "Without real-time shared context, speed creates chaos."
What is Meta Business Agent?
Meta made Business Agent available to every business on June 3 at its Conversations event in London, after about two years of testing. The announcement said more than one million businesses already used it on WhatsApp and Messenger, and that people and businesses exchange more than one billion message threads a day across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. The agent answers questions about a business, recommends products from its catalog, books appointments, sorts sales leads and completes purchases. It's free to start, and Meta said paid subscriptions would follow. A separate Business Agent Platform lets large companies connect the agent to systems like Shopify and Zendesk.
The apparent fit is Stilla's focus on maintaining context across many conversations and tools, and Business Agent has to remember what a customer asked last week and what the merchant has in stock. Axios described the deal as part of Meta's effort to make its chatbots useful to merchants who need help turning customer conversations into purchases. Meta hasn't said how it plans to use Stilla's technology.
