“AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics,” Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief data officer, wrote on LinkedIn. His Friday post announced that Meta has bought Sundial, an AI analytics startup founded by two former Meta employees.
The deal brings Sundial’s team and software inside Meta, and it takes the product away from everyone else. Sundial will stop serving external customers when the acquisition closes, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Axios, which first reported the purchase. No price was disclosed.
Co-founders Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan are returning to Meta along with Stanley Watt, Asa Levi, John Maier and other members of the staff. Narayanan, who said in his own post that he left Meta nine years ago, will lead its data analytics tooling and agents work. Zhuo was previously Meta’s vice president of product design. Narayanan has been analytics chief at Sequoia Capital and Instagram and director of analytics at Facebook.
What Meta’s data group is for
Schultz has held the data job only since July, when Meta made him its first chief data officer after six years as chief marketing officer. His company bio says he leads Meta’s shift to AI-led analytics and research, covering analytics, data science, data engineering, competitive intelligence and user research. The group he runs is called Data Analytics Tooling & Agents, or DATA, and Axios reported that it also monitors Meta’s critical AI systems and issues alerts.
Schultz wrote that 8 in 10 new hires tell the company in internal surveys that its AI analytics tools are the best they have used. Buying Sundial adds people who built that kind of tool for paying clients.
Sundial’s pitch was self-service analysis. People in product, engineering, go-to-market or finance roles could put questions to company data in plain language and get answers without waiting in a central data team’s queue. Snowflake comes at related ground from the warehouse side. It has put parts of Horizon Context into public preview, a layer that adds business meaning to metadata so people, BI tools and AI agents start from the same definitions.
Who was using it
The announcements did not say how many customers Sundial had or which ones are affected. When the company raised money last year, its funding release said it had worked with Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing AI startups, and it quoted David Sasaki, VP of analytics and insights at OpenAI, who said Sundial “automated complex data engineering tasks that would have taken our small team months to build internally.”
The startup had raised $23 million in total, including a $16 million Series A led by DJ Patil of GPV, the first U.S. chief data scientist, with Sequoia Capital among its other backers. Meta’s capital spending, including finance-lease principal, came to $34.91 billion in the third quarter, and on Wednesday the company laid out plans for a new class of nonvoting stock it can sell to pay for its AI buildout.