(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. has hired the founders and team behind the artificial intelligence 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 Monday morning that was reviewed by Bloomberg. While the new hires will work on AI agents and associated projects at Meta, the deal did not include Dreamer’s technology, a person familiar with the matter said.
“Our conviction in agents is stronger than ever,” Wang wrote in his note announcing the hires. Meta is “building agents that are truly personalized and always-on, with the ability to integrate across surfaces and wearables.”
AI agents, or autonomous bots that can complete tasks on behalf of humans, have materialized 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.”
Meta already agred to spend more than $2 billion 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.
Dreamer was founded by a collection of tech veterans, including David Singleton, who was formerly the chief technology officer at financial technology firm Stripe, and before that was vice president of engineering on Google’s Android product. Barra also worked as a VP 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 $56 million at a $500 million valuation, Bloomberg News reported in 2024. Meta’s Wang invested in that round. The future of the company and its technology is unclear after the departures.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the hiring deal.
