Meta has agreed to acquire Stilla.ai, a Swedish startup founded by former Shopify executives, to reinforce its Meta Business Agent. Announced in September 2026, the strategic buyout aims to transform WhatsApp and Instagram into channels where customers can consult, pay, and close operations without leaving the apps, allowing more than 200 million companies using WhatsApp Business to handle these processes natively.
Engineering Conversational Commerce: The Stilla.ai Acquisition
Meta’s core monetization model remains deeply rooted in advertising. Yet, a much smaller secondary segment captured attention in the company’s latest financial disclosures by scaling at nearly three times the velocity of its legacy ad business. Seeking to accelerate this vertical, leadership targeted Stilla.ai, an eight-month-old startup that secured a $5 million initial funding round this past January.
When the transaction finalizes, Stilla’s team and core software architecture will merge directly into Meta Business Agent. Launched globally on June 3, 2026, the enterprise-facing AI assistant already handles queries for over one million businesses across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. It responds to questions, recommends products, schedules appointments, and flags when a conversation requires the participation of a salesman. Stilla brings the capability for the assistant to conserve client information, even if the company uses different platforms.
Solving LLM Amnesia in Enterprise Workflows
Traditional AI tools suffer from a problem in commercial settings: they lose context when a conversation ends, forcing returning customers to start practically from scratch upon a new query.
Stilla’s founders—Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin—built their technical framework to solve this. Having previously sold their earlier venture to Shopify in 2018 and subsequently working on Shop Pay, the tool that allows completing a purchase with a single touch, the duo had experience simplifying the payment process of online commerce.
Their software preserves client information across multi-platform enterprise deployments. If a user interacts across different platforms, the underlying agent can remember who they are, what they bought before, and if they had a pending claim. That capability allows the assistant to intervene in more stages of the customer relationship.
Aggressive Rollout and Monetization Tiers
Meta is scaling its enterprise AI offerings. Following the global deployment of Business Agent on June 3, 2026, Meta began charging for the service on August 1, 2026. Smaller companies access the technology via a subscription to WhatsApp Business Premium, while larger corporations pay based on usage, with a cost approximately between US$ 0,04 and US$ 0,05 per response.
This monetization strategy expands further up-market. Meta recently added the assistant to the corporate plans of Meta One, a subscription package presented last week with prices up to $499 per month. These layered pricing mechanics generated fiscal impact. During the second quarter, “other revenue” within Meta’s applications division crossed the $1 billion threshold for the first time, marking a 73% year-over-year surge largely fueled by paid messaging and WhatsApp subscriptions.
However, this sector remains small compared to the advertising business, which saw the applications division invoice over US$ 60.000 million in the quarter.
Disrupting the SaaS Middleware Ecosystem
By bringing customer support, sales, and payment capabilities natively into WhatsApp and Instagram, Meta poses a threat to software companies like HubSpot, which charge small and medium-sized businesses for customer management, sales, and marketing campaigns.
Stilla’s own technical blueprint underscores this ecosystem overlap. The startup’s assistant can integrate with HubSpot, Slack, GitHub, and Stripe—integrations so closely watched that HubSpot’s marketing director previously backed Stilla as an angel investor.
If small businesses find they can centralize customer service, sales, and payment entirely within Meta’s messaging ecosystem, the need for external platforms diminishes.
