Key points
- Meta agrees to acquire AI analytics startup Sundial
- Sundial's founders return to Meta
- Sundial's outside customers will lose access
Meta Platforms (META) has agreed to acquire Sundial, an AI data analytics startup founded by two former Meta employees. The team will join Meta's new data analytics organization, led by chief data officer Alex Schultz, who announced the deal on LinkedIn. "AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics," he wrote.
Sundial will stop serving outside customers when the deal closes. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal on Friday, October 23. No price was disclosed. The deal was reported after trading ended; Meta shares had closed down about 1% at $642.62.
Sundial's founders are former Meta executives
Co-founders Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan will join Meta. Zhuo was Meta's vice president of product design. Narayanan was the analytics chief at Sequoia Capital and Instagram, and was director of analytics at Facebook.
Schultz said Narayanan will lead Meta's data analytics tooling and agents work. Other Sundial employees, including several Meta alumni, are joining too.
What Sundial's software does
Sundial lets employees ask questions about their company's data in everyday language and get answers through a chatbot plug-in. Teams can explore the data themselves rather than ask a separate analytics team to run each query.
The startup raised $23 million in total as of July 2025, including a $16 million Series A led by DJ Patil, a partner at GPV who was the first U.S. chief data scientist. Sequoia Capital, Slow Ventures, and Electric Capital also invested.
Inside Meta's new DATA unit
Meta named Schultz, its former marketing chief, its first chief data officer in July. He runs a unit called Data Analytics Tooling & Agents, nicknamed DATA. It handles descriptive analysis, including finding questions the company hasn't asked yet, and runs experiments to test and improve Meta's data and AI products. It also monitors the company's critical AI systems and issues alerts.
The deal comes two days after Meta reported $34.9 billion of third-quarter capital spending, up 80% from a year earlier. Meta has also been pushing employees toward its own AI tools, and the number of its employees using Anthropic's Claude Code has fallen by about half this year.
OpenAI's analytics team used Sundial
Sundial's 2025 funding announcement quoted David Sasaki, identified as OpenAI's vice president of analytics and insights. "Sundial automated complex data engineering tasks that would have taken our small team months to build internally," he said.
Axios didn't identify Sundial's current customers.
