Meta acquires Stilla.ai to push Business Agent from…

The Stockholm startup, whose founders built Shop Pay at Shopify, joins Meta as Business Agent moves beyond customer service on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram — with paid messaging on those channels already a growing revenue line.

Meta has acquired Stockholm-based Stilla.ai, Axios reported on September 9, folding a nine-month-old startup with $5 million in pre-seed funding into the Business Agent surface that already runs inside WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram for more than one million businesses. The purchase isn’t about headcount. It’s about closing the gap between an assistant that answers and one that sells.

Stilla’s co-founders, Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, sold their earlier company to Shopify in 2018 and worked on Shop Pay. That pedigree matters. Forbes framed the acquisition as the difference “between a chatbot and a shop assistant,” powered by Stilla software that gives an assistant persistent memory across the tools a business runs, retaining customer history and prior interactions across sessions.

The commerce logic is already in the earnings. TheStreet, citing Meta’s Q2 2026 presentation, put the “other revenue” line inside Family of Apps at $1 billion, up 73% year over year, outpacing 27% ad growth. Meta began charging for Business Agent on August 1 through WhatsApp Business Premium subscriptions and token-based pricing at $2.00 per million tokens. Business Agent itself went globally available on June 3.

Then on September 15, Meta shipped the WhatsApp Business Tools MCP, letting Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT set up WhatsApp Business accounts and Cloud API access conversationally. The boring parts of onboarding are now handled by other people’s agents. Meta’s agent handles the sale.

For a founder-led B2C business, Instagram DMs and WhatsApp threads are quietly becoming transactional surfaces. That reframes the organic social distribution question and folds directly into any serious customer-acquisition strategy against AI-mediated discovery: the catalog, the product copy, and the outreach content are what the agent will actually say on your behalf.

LemonLime, a done-for-you sales and marketing service at lemonlime.com, prepares branded content and outreach across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, the same channels Business Agent now operates in, so an owner can feed the surface without building the workflow.

Stilla was in stealth in January. By September it was inside Meta’s commerce stack. The compression is the story.

Meta acquires Stilla.ai to push Business Agent from support into closing sales

Sources