Meta Acquires AI Coding Startup Conductor

Meta has acquired AI coding startup Conductor, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Conductor lets developers run several AI coding agents at once, each in an isolated copy of a codebase, and then review and merge what they produce. Supported agents include Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Cursor. Users pay for the agents through their own subscriptions and keys.

Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz said the startup is joining Meta. "I have big news: Conductor is joining Meta," Holtz wrote. "We have some big, crazy plans for the next interface," he added, teasing that the company would have "something new" for customers to use by "early next year."

On X, Holtz said he was looking forward to working with Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, and Nat Friedman, head of product at the company's Superintelligence Labs. "They've been on an absolute tear, and I'm convinced MSL has the highest talent density of all the labs," he added.

Meta confirmed the acquisition but would not comment further or provide additional details about the deal. Terms were not disclosed.

Conductor's cloud service goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down on November 20, after which the company will begin deleting user cloud data. New sign-ups and downloads have stopped. Pro subscribers now get their paid features free, and active subscribers will receive refunds. Users can export their data or move cloud workspaces onto their own machines before the shutdown. The local version of the Mac app will keep receiving new AI models and critical bug fixes until early 2027, when it will begin winding down.

Conductor was founded in 2024 and formally known as Melty Inc. It raised a $22 million Series A in March from Spark Capital and Matrix. Y Combinator and the founders of Notion and Linear are also backers. More than 100,000 people use the product, according to Conductor's website.

The acquisition follows two Meta model releases last month that pitched coding as a strength. On October 15, Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weights version of its Muse Spark model aimed at coding and long-running agent work. Meta's more capable Muse Wonder models stay closed inside its own Muse Code terminal and application programming interface.

On the same day as Meta's acquisition, OpenAI said it plans to acquire developer tools startup Pierre Computer. OpenAI had already announced plans in June to buy Ona, which runs coding agents in cloud sandboxes.

Sources

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.