Meta Platforms Inc. has just swooped on another acqui-hire, signing up the co-founders and personnel of an agentic artificial intelligence startup called Dreamer for an undisclosed price.

Dreamer’s team, which includes former Meta and Google LLC executive Hugo Barra, will go to work within Meta’s Superintelligence Labs group under Chief AI Officer and former Scale AI Inc. founder Alexandr Wang, according to a report in Bloomberg. They’ll be working on AI agents and associated projects, the report said.

The backers of Dreamer, which has built a platform that helps people create their own AI agents, will be paid more than their investment in the startup, one person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Under the terms of the deal, Dreamer will remain a standalone legal entity, and Meta will obtain a non-exclusive license to use its technology.

Dreamer co-founder and Chief Executive David Singleton confirmed the deal in a post on X, thanking Wang for helping to build the company. Wang was an angel investor, participating in a funding round in 2024. Singleton explained that he had demonstrated Dreamer’s technology to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year. “It was clear right away that we share the same vision of the future: one where billions of people have the power to create software that makes their lives better,” he said.

“The idea behind Dreamer is simple: every person should have the power to create software that makes their lives better,” Barra added in his own X post.

AI agents are autonomous systems that can perform tasks on behalf of humans with minimal supervision, and they have become a key part of Meta’s AI ambitions. In January, Zuckerberg said that his team has made “quite profound” improvements to AI agents recently, and are using them with coding and other tasks.

Wang also spoke about the impact of AI agents during an interview earlier this year, saying they provide an opportunity to “give a more powerful version of AI to every single person in the world.”

Meta is spending a lot of money on AI agents. In December, it announced it was spending $2 billion to acquire a startup called Manus, which has developed autonomous agents that can use a web browser to perform tasks like booking a hotel room and reserving a table at a restaurant. At the time, Meta said it plans to integrate Manus’ technology in its own applications and services.

More recently, it swooped to acquire a startup called Moltbook, which operates a strangely fascinating Reddit-like social media network for AI agents.

Dreamer was founded by a team of technology veterans who possess a wealth of experience, and not just in AI. Singleton previously served as the chief technology officer of Stripe Inc. and as vice president of engineering in Google’s Android unit. Barra also worked on Google’s Android team, before joining Xiaomi Corp. and then Meta, where he led the company’s virtual reality unit. He left Meta in 2021.

A third co-founder is Dreamer Chief Design Officer Nicholas Jitkoff, who formerly helped to design Google’s Chrome OS operating system.

Dreamer had previously raised $56 million at a $500 million valuation in November 2024.

Image: Dreamer