Meta has acquired Sundial, an AI-powered data analytics startup co-founded by former Meta executives Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan, a Meta spokesperson confirmed on October 23. The price was not disclosed. Sundial will fold into Meta's new data analytics organization, led by chief data officer Alex Schultz.
Zhuo and Narayanan are joining Meta along with other Sundial staff, several of whom are Meta alumni. Narayanan will lead Meta's data analytics tooling and agents work. Sundial will stop serving external customers once the deal closes and will not continue as a standalone product.
Sundial's product lets teams ask questions about their data in natural language and get actionable insights back through a chatbot plugin, so analysis does not have to route through a centralized data team. The company described its platform as combining dashboards, notebooks and data pipelines in one product, with AI handling steps such as cleaning data, building semantic layers and writing SQL.
Key facts
- 01Meta acquired AI data analytics startup Sundial; a Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal on October 23, 2026.
- 02Co-founders Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan join Meta; Narayanan will lead data analytics tooling and agents work.
- 03Sundial will stop serving external customers when the deal closes; the price was not disclosed.
- 04Sundial raised $23M in total, including a $16M Series A in July 2025 led by DJ Patil of GPV.
- 05The team joins Meta's DATA unit under Alex Schultz, named Meta's first chief data officer in July.
Both founders have long Meta histories. Zhuo was previously Meta's VP of product design. Narayanan was director of analytics at Facebook and has also led analytics at Instagram and Sequoia Capital. The pair started Sundial in 2021.
Sundial raised $23 million in total. Its largest round was a $16 million Series A in July 2025, led by DJ Patil of GPV, and Sequoia Capital was also among its backers. OpenAI has been listed as a Sundial client.
Meta is expanding its data and analytics team because AI has greatly increased demand for insights. In July, Meta named Schultz, its former marketing chief, as its first chief data officer. He oversees the new Data Analytics Tooling & Agents unit, nicknamed DATA, which handles descriptive analysis, experimentation and monitoring of Meta's critical AI systems.
“AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics.”— Alex Schultz, Chief data officer at Meta
In April 2026, Sundial joined the Open Semantic Interchange, a Snowflake-led effort to standardize how data metrics are defined across AI tools.
Meta has not disclosed the deal terms, the number of Sundial employees joining, or what happens to Sundial's existing customer relationships, including OpenAI.
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