NEW YOK: Meta Platforms Inc has hired the founders and team behind the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Dreamer, which launched earlier this year to help people create their own AI agents.
The Dreamer team, including one co-founder, Hugo Barra, who previously worked at Meta, is joining the Meta Superintelligence Labs group under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, according to an internal post Wang sent on Monday.
The new hires will work on AI agents and associated projects at Meta.
While terms of the arrangement were not disclosed, Dreamer backers will be paid back more than their investment, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dreamer remains its own legal entity, and the deal included a non-exclusive licence for Meta to use Dreamer’s technology, the person added.
In a post on LinkedIn, Dreamer co-founder, David Singleton, confirmed the deal and thanked Wang, who is an investor in Dreamer, for his help as they built the company.
Singleton also added that he showed Zuckerberg the product earlier this year.
“It was clear right away that we shared the same vision of the future: one where billions of people have the power to create software that makes their lives better,” Singleton wrote.
AI agents, or autonomous bots that can complete tasks on behalf of humans, have materialised as a key focus for Meta, which is spending aggressively on AI talent and infrastructure.
Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s last earnings call in January that improvements to AI agents have been “quite profound”, and that engineers at the company are using them to help with coding and other tasks.
Wang, too, spoke about agents during an interview in India earlier this year, saying that they provide “some of the greatest opportunity to actually give a more powerful version of AI to every single person in the world”.
“Our conviction in agents is stronger than ever,” Wang wrote in his note on Monday announcing the new hires. “Meta is building agents that are truly personalised and always-on, with the ability to integrate across surfaces and wearables.”
Meta already agreed to spend more than US$2bil to acquire Manus, a popular AI agent company, last December, with plans to deploy it to businesses that use Meta’s various apps and services.
It also said it would acquire Moltbook, the social network for AI agents, earlier this month. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the Dreamer deal.
Dreamer was founded by a collection of tech veterans, including Singleton, who was formerly the chief technology officer at financial technology firm Stripe and vice-president of engineering on Google’s Android product.
Barra also worked as a vice-president of product management for Android at Google, and later joined Meta from Xiaomi Corp to lead the company’s virtual reality division. He departed Meta in 2021.
Dreamer’s chief design officer, Nicholas Jitkoff, was formerly a leading designer for Google Chrome OS. All three are joining Meta, according to Wang’s post. Dreamer previously raised US$56mil at a US$500mil valuation, Bloomberg News reported in 2024.
“The biggest challenge you have as a startup in the AI space is that it’s shifting sands,” said Nikesh Arora, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks Inc and an early backer of Dreamer, in an interview on Monday. — Bloomberg
