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Meta Business Agent starts closing sales as Stilla.ai deal targets memory gap

The AI assistant now serving over a million businesses on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram is being upgraded from support bot to transaction-closer — with new per-message pricing due October 1.

By Dario Vasquez·Deployments & incidents·

Meta is buying Stockholm’s Stilla.ai to bolt persistent memory onto Meta Business Agent, the assistant Forbes reports is already answering customers for more than a million businesses across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. Axios first reported the acquisition on September 9. The strategic read is straightforward: a support bot that forgets you between visits is a curiosity, while one that remembers your last order is a salesperson.

Stilla.ai was founded in 2024, emerged from stealth in January, and raised $5 million in pre-seed funding. Its founders, Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, sold a prior company to Shopify in 2018 and worked on Shop Pay. That lineage matters. The Stilla pitch, per Forbes, is that most AI assistants forget everything the moment a conversation ends, and the founders spent years inside the commerce stack that solved the equivalent problem for checkout.

The timing is the actual news. Meta Business Agent went globally available on June 3, when Mark Zuckerberg framed it as an agent for “every business, of any size.” Meta began charging on August 1. From October 1, per Forbes, more of the messages businesses send through WhatsApp become chargeable. TechCrunch’s June coverage detailed the agent’s expanding scope: answering questions, recommending products, booking appointments, qualifying sales leads and rerouting to a human.

Then, on September 15, Meta shipped the WhatsApp Business Tools MCP server, letting AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex and ChatGPT configure WhatsApp Cloud API accounts through natural language. A founder-led B2C operator can now stand up an inbound sales channel without a developer, inside apps consumers already open a dozen times a day.

Stilla’s memory layer won’t ship until the deal closes and integration lands, and Meta hasn’t offered a timeline. What arrives first is the pricing change. The window to test the current agent at current rates closes in under two weeks, which is the sort of soft deadline that quietly restructures a channel before anyone writes the case study.

Sources