Meta has acquired Sundial, an AI-powered data analytics startup founded by two former Meta executives, Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal to Axios, which reported it on October 23, 2026.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Sundial will not continue as a standalone product. The company is being folded into Meta's new data analytics organisation, led by chief data officer Alex Schultz, and will stop serving external customers once the deal closes. Zhuo and Narayanan are joining Meta along with other Sundial employees, several of whom previously worked at the company, Axios reported.
What Sundial built
Sundial sold an analytics platform that answers questions asked in plain language and analyses complex data, delivering its findings through a chatbot plug-in, according to Axios. When it announced its funding in July 2025, the company said its product combined dashboards, notebooks and data transformation pipelines in a single tool, and that it had been used by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing AI startups.
That 2025 announcement included a testimonial from David Sasaki, vice president of analytics and insights at OpenAI, who said the platform had automated data engineering work that would have taken his team months. CryptoBriefing reported that OpenAI was among Sundial's clients, and that in April 2026 Sundial joined the Open Semantic Interchange, an industry initiative led by Snowflake.
CryptoBriefing described Sundial's pitch as a combination of AI, contextual data and what the company called expert playbooks.
“AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics.”
The founders and the funding
Zhuo was Meta's vice president of product design. Narayanan was director of analytics at Facebook and later head of analytics at Instagram, and also served as chief analytics officer at the venture firm Sequoia Capital, according to Axios and Sundial's 2025 funding announcement. The two co-founded Sundial in 2021, Dealroom and CryptoBriefing reported.
Sundial raised $23 million in total, including a $16 million Series A led by DJ Patil, a partner at GPV who served as the first chief data scientist of the United States. Other backers named in the 2025 announcement were Sequoia Capital, Sunflower Capital, Slow Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Tribe Capital and Electric Capital, along with individual investors including Fidji Simo, Tobi Lütke and Drew Houston.
At the time, Sundial said it would use the money to expand its engineering and product teams and invest in its core AI capabilities.
Why Meta is buying
Meta named Schultz, its former chief marketing officer, as its first chief data officer in July. He oversees a unit called Data Analytics Tooling & Agents, nicknamed DATA, which handles descriptive analysis, runs experiments to test and improve data and AI products, and monitors critical AI systems with alerts, Axios reported.
Schultz announced the Sundial deal in a LinkedIn post and said Narayanan will lead Meta's data analytics tooling and agents work.
"AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics," Schultz wrote.
Because Sundial is going into an internal organisation rather than becoming a product Meta sells, the deal looks aimed at the people and the tools they built. Dealroom described it as a targeted talent-and-tools acquisition rather than the start of a new public product.
What happens to customers
Sundial's existing customers will lose access to the product. Axios reported that the company will stop serving external clients when the acquisition closes. Neither company said when that would be or how customers would be moved off the platform.
The outcome is a change of course from the plan Sundial laid out 15 months earlier, when it said the Series A money would also go toward scaling adoption of its platform with outside companies.
The deal comes as large software companies add AI tools for data work. Dealroom noted that Salesforce agreed in October to acquire Loops, another AI analytics startup, and that Microsoft and SAP have added AI data tools this year.
