The deal
Meta is acquiring Stilla, a Stockholm agent startup, Axios reported on 9 September. Financial terms were not disclosed. Meta says the technology will accelerate Meta Business Agent, the system that lets merchants handle customer conversations and transactions across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
Stilla emerged from stealth in January 2026 with $5 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst. It was founded by Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, who previously built Tictail, sold it to Shopify, and worked on Shop and Shop Pay there. Eight months in market is a short run, and the buyer’s product area is the one the founders spent the previous decade in.
What Stilla built
The company’s product is an agent platform that works across an organisation’s own tools and workflows, with the engineering attention on shared context, permissions and enterprise-grade infrastructure. Those three are the unglamorous half of agent products and the half that decides whether a business will let software act on its behalf.
That is the fit. Meta’s problem in commerce is not generating a reply; it is letting an agent take an action inside a merchant’s systems without the merchant losing control of who can do what.
Why Meta wants it now
Meta says Business Agent is used by more than a million businesses, and that more than a billion business conversations take place across its messaging apps each day. The company launched its consumer agent, Muse, on 8 September. Buying Stilla the following day fills in the other side: consumers get an agent that shops, merchants get an agent that sells, and both run inside Meta’s messaging apps.
Stilla says its platform will continue operating for existing customers while the team and technology move to Meta. Acquisitions of this shape often end with the standalone product wound down; the commitment as reported is continuity, and it is worth checking against in six months.
What to watch
Meta also said it plans to expand its presence in Sweden off the back of the deal. For a market that has spent two years watching its AI companies raise abroad, the more interesting question is whether that means an engineering site or a line in a press release. Watch for headcount, and for whether Business Agent gains the permission model Stilla was built around.
