Meta buys Sundial, the AI analytics platform that once served OpenAI
Meta has acquired Sundial, an AI-powered data analytics platform founded by two former Meta employees, and the team is returning to build internal analytics tools.
Meta has bought Sundial, a data analytics platform built around AI. The acquisition was announced on October 23, 2026 by Sundial co-founder Julie Zhuo and confirmed by a Meta spokesperson to Axios. Zhuo and fellow co-founder Chandra Narayanan are returning to Meta along with several members of their team.
Sundial previously served customers including OpenAI and Gamma. Once the deal closes, the company will stop serving external customers entirely.
1. What Sundial does
Sundial makes data analysis easier inside a company. Users ask questions in plain language about company data, and the platform answers with analysis.
Work that normally needs data specialists, like cleaning data, building semantic layers and writing SQL, is automated. In her announcement, Julie Zhuo said Sundial started almost six years ago, before the AI wave, and later rebuilt itself to be AI-native.
2. Who is returning to Meta
Julie Zhuo was previously Meta's vice president of product design, where she spent more than a decade. Chandra Narayanan was analytics chief at Sequoia Capital and Instagram, and director of analytics at Facebook.
Other Sundial team members are joining too, including Stanley Watt, Asa Levi and John Maier, according to TokenPost. Existing Sundial customers will lose the service when the deal closes, because the technology will be used inside Meta only.
3. Where the team sits inside Meta
The Sundial team joins Meta's new data analytics organization led by Alex Schultz, the company's first chief data officer, appointed on July 1, 2026. The unit is named Data Analytics Tooling and Agents, or DATA for short.
Narayanan will lead Meta's data analytics tooling and agents work. In a LinkedIn post, Schultz wrote, "AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics."
4. What it was worth
Meta has not disclosed the financial terms. What is known: Sundial had raised 23 million dollars in total, including a 16 million dollar Series A led by DJ Patil of GPV, according to TokenPost.
This is not a giant AI acquisition, but it matters because the value is in people and technology, not just assets.
5. Why Meta is doing this
Meta is investing heavily in its data and analytics teams. The DATA unit handles descriptive analysis, experimentation to test and improve Meta's data and AI products, and monitoring of the company's critical AI systems with automated alerts.
By buying Sundial, Meta gets a team that already built AI analytics tools for other companies, including OpenAI, and can use that technology for itself. That is faster than building everything from scratch.
What it means for you
Most of us will not buy an analytics company, but the direction is clear: large companies want every team to run its own data analysis without waiting on a central data unit.
- Asking the right question matters more. Tools like Sundial write the SQL for you, but you still need to know which question to ask.
- If your company uses Sundial, plan your exit. Service to external customers stops when the deal closes.
- Compare tools before committing. The AI analytics market moves fast, and today's best tool can be acquired or shut down within a year.
- For Malaysian developers, the niche is still open. Big tech companies prefer to buy small teams that have solved a specific problem well.