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"AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics," Alex Schultz, Meta's chief data officer, wrote on LinkedIn. His Friday post announced that Meta has bought Sundial, an AI analytics startup founded by two former Meta employees.
The deal brings Sundial's team and software inside Meta, and it takes the product away from everyone else. Sundial will stop serving external customers when the acquisition closes, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Axios, which first reported the purchase. No price was disclosed.
Co-founders Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan are returning to Meta along with Stanley Watt, Asa Levi, John Maier and other members of the staff. Narayanan, who said in his own post that he left Meta nine years ago, will lead its data analytics tooling and agents work. Zhuo was previously Meta's vice president of product design. Narayanan has been analytics chief at Sequoia Capital and Instagram and director of analytics at Facebook.
What Meta's data group is for
Schultz has held the data job only since July, when Meta made him its first chief data officer after six years as chief marketing officer. His company bio says he leads Meta's shift to AI-led analytics and research, covering analytics, data science, data engineering, competitive intelligence and user research. The group he runs is called Data Analytics Tooling & Agents, or DATA, and Axios reported that it also monitors Meta's critical AI systems and issues alerts. |
