Key points
▶ Meta has acquired AI data analytics platform Sundial, Axios reported on October 23 (local time), with a Meta spokesperson confirming the deal.
▶ Sundial is a platform that analyzes complex data and provides answers when users ask questions in everyday language.
▶ The company raised $23 million (about 31.9 billion won) from investors including Sequoia Capital last July, and OpenAI was one of its customers.
Meta has reacquired an AI data analytics startup founded by former company executives. Axios exclusively reported on the 23rd (local time) that Meta had acquired Sundial, an AI data analytics platform, and a Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal.
Sundial co-founders Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan, along with other employees, will join Meta, and the company’s technology will move with them. The acquisition price was not disclosed. Sundial will discontinue its services for external customers once the deal closes.
Two former Meta executives founded the company
Zhuo previously served as Meta’s vice president of product design. Narayanan was Facebook’s director of analytics and later led analytics at Instagram before becoming chief analytics officer at Sequoia Capital. When they founded Sundial, the pair described it as a company “built by former Meta executives.” Several Sundial employees also came from Meta, and they, too, will return to the company.
Sundial is a platform that analyzes complex data and provides actionable answers when users ask questions in everyday language. It is used in the form of a chatbot plugin.
The platform combines dashboards, analytics notebooks and data-transformation pipelines in one tool. Its AI agents also use the results of analyses to suggest next steps. The company’s stated advantage is speed: instead of asking a central data team to run an analysis and waiting for a response, teams can work with the data themselves.
Sundial also attracted investment. Last July, it announced that it had raised a total of $23 million. A $16 million Series A round was led by DJ Patil, the United States’ first chief data scientist, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Slow Ventures and Unusual Ventures, among others.
Individual investors included Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. At the time, OpenAI Vice President of Analytics and Insights David Sasaki said, “Sundial automated complex data-engineering work that would have taken our small team months to build internally.”
Joining the CDO organization established in July
Sundial will join the data analytics organization Meta established on July 1. That day, Meta appointed Alex Schultz, who joined the company in 2007 and had served as chief marketing officer (CMO), as its first chief data officer (CDO).
At the time, Schultz said, “In this new role, my focus is on changing how Meta learns and makes decisions in the age of AI.” The organization he leads is called Data Analytics Tools and Agents (DATA). Its responsibilities include explaining data through analysis and identifying questions the company has not yet asked; testing and improving data and AI products through experimentation; and monitoring and issuing alerts for key AI systems.
In a LinkedIn post, Schultz explained why Meta acquired Sundial. “AI has effectively made the demand for insights infinite,” he wrote. “We want to define the future of AI analytics.” Narayanan will lead the development of Meta’s data analytics tools and agents. The plan is to repurpose for internal use the conversational analytics tool Sundial had developed for external customers.
OpenAI and other customers will lose access to the tool
The deal will leave external customers without the service. A Meta spokesperson said Sundial would stop serving external customers once the transaction closes. Sundial said last year that it served Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing AI startups; OpenAI was the only customer it named publicly. The number of customers and what support will be available after the service ends have not been disclosed. Narayanan said he is returning to Meta nine years after leaving the company.
Since last year, Meta has spent heavily to acquire AI talent and technology. In June last year, it invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling company Scale AI and brought in CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its “superintelligence” development team. In December, it acquired general-purpose AI agent startup Manus; The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was worth more than $2 billion. In January, Meta projected capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion for this year.
The Sundial acquisition brings a product built for external customers inside the company. Unlike Meta’s earlier deals, which involved large AI models or agents, this one is focused on an internal data analytics tool.
From a dedicated team to every department
The deal points to a shift in how data analytics organizations operate. Sundial’s product was designed to replace a system in which teams submit requests to a central data organization and wait for answers with one in which each team can ask questions and get answers directly.
Meta plans to bring in the entire company that sold the tool externally and deploy it throughout its own organization. Schultz’s remark about “infinite demand” can be understood to mean that, in the AI era, decisions increasingly require data to support them, pushing analytics requests beyond what a dedicated team can handle.
South Korean companies face the same problem. The number of data analysts is limited, while requests from business departments are growing. Meta’s approach was not to hire more analysts, but to acquire a tool that lets employees ask questions and get answers themselves, roll it out across the organization, and establish a separate CDO organization to oversee the work. The deal also brings in the people who built the tool so they can adapt it to the company’s internal needs. The closing date and plans for supporting Sundial’s customers have not yet been disclosed.