Meta buys Swedish agent startup Stilla.ai for its Business Agent product

Axios first reported the purchase on September 9, and no price was disclosed. Stilla.ai is a Swedish AI startup that launched about eight months earlier. Meta says it will bring the team and technology into its agentic business offerings. The target product is Meta's Business Agent, launched in June, which lets brands automate replies to customers inside the direct-messaging tools of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. Meta says more than one million businesses use it. The agent is central to Meta's effort to sell Meta One subscriptions and to earn revenue beyond advertising, while agent development costs the company billions. For AI builders, the deal is another example of a platform owner buying a very young team that has already built conversational commerce agents. Startups building on messaging channels depend on platforms that can acquire or copy their feature set. An early exit to the channel owner is one plausible outcome, and it also reduces independent options in that segment.