Meta Hires Former Google, Stripe Executives Behind AI Startup Dreamer
(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. has hired the founders and team behind AI startup Dreamer, which launched earlier this year to help people build their own AI agents.
The Dreamer team, including Hugo Barra, who previously worked at Meta, is joining the Meta Super Intelligence Labs group led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, according to an internal post from Wang on Monday morning and reviewed by Bloomberg. The new hires will work on AI agents and related projects at Meta, but the deal does not include Dreamer’s technology, a person familiar with the matter said.
“Our belief in agents is stronger than ever,” Wang wrote in his memo announcing the hires. Meta are “truly personalized and always-on fabric agents with the ability to integrate across surfaces and wearable devices.”
AI agents, or autonomous bots, that can complete tasks on behalf of humans have become a major focus for Meta, which has been spending aggressively on AI capabilities and infrastructure. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s last earnings call in January that advances in AI agents are “pretty deep” and that engineers at the company are using them to help with coding and other tasks. Wang also talked about the spies during an interview in India earlier this year, saying they provide “some of the greatest opportunities to give every single person in the world a more powerful version of artificial intelligence.”
Last December, Meta agreed to spend more than $2 billion to acquire Manus, a popular artificial intelligence brokerage company, and plans to distribute it to businesses that use Meta’s various applications and services. It also said earlier this month that it would acquire Moltbook, a social network for AI agents.
Dreamer was founded by a group of tech experts including David Singleton, who was previously chief technology officer at financial technology firm Stripe and before that was vice president of engineering for Google’s Android product. Barra also worked at Google as vice president of Android product management and later joined Meta from Xiaomi Corp. to lead the company’s virtual reality division. He left Meta in 2021. Dreamer’s chief design officer, Nicholas Jitkoff, was previously the lead designer of Google Chrome OS. According to Wang’s post, all three are joining Meta.
Dreamer previously raised $56 million at a $500 million valuation, Bloomberg News reported in 2024. Meta’s Wang invested in this round. Following the departures, the future of the company and its technology remain uncertain.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment on the hiring deal.
More stories like this available Bloomberg.com
