META ACQUIRES AI CODING START-UP CONDUCTOR

Meta has acquired Conductor, an AI coding start-up that lets users run multiple coding agents in parallel across a Mac, iPhone or the cloud. The deal was first reported by Axios on 4 November, and Conductor confirmed the acquisition on its own blog. Conductor was founded in 2024 by chief executive Charlie Holtz and chief technology officer Jackson de Campos. Its platform, launched in July 2025, uses first-party agents from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode to let developers run several AI instances at once. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Conductor raised $22m in Series A funding in March from investors Spark and Matrix. Following the acquisition, the company said its platform "will keep working as normal", though Conductor Cloud will shut down over the coming weeks. Holtz wrote on X: "I am very excited to share that Conductor is joining Meta. We have some big, crazy plans for the next interface." A blog post detailing the deal set out a timeline and instructions for existing and prospective users of the platform.

Large AI companies have continued buying smaller firms that build AI development tools. OpenAI said this week it would acquire Pierre, a company behind what it describes as open-source developer tools. Meta acquired Moltbook, a platform for AI agents, in March, but earlier this year abandoned a $2bn deal for Chinese start-up Manus after the Chinese government blocked the acquisition on national security grounds. Meta unveiled its Muse Spark Open AI model last month, which it describes as its most capable open-weight model to date, with 816 billion total parameters and a 1 million-token context window for coding and reasoning tasks.