Meta recently hired the team of engineers behind Gizmo, a buzzy AI startup founded by ex-Snapchat staffers.
A spokesperson for Meta confirmed that the team joined Meta earlier this year. The company declined to disclose the financial details of the deal.
Gizmo is the sole product from Atma Sciences Inc., which was founded in 2024. The team includes Josh Siegel (CEO), Daniel Amitay (CTO), Brandon Francis, and Rudd Fawcett, among several other ex-Snapchat engineers, according to LinkedIn.
Meta has a non-exclusive license to Atma Sciences' technology.
Gizmo lets users create interactive, touch-enabled content — like a tiny game or mini-app — by typing out a prompt. For example, I made an interactive "Gizmo" of a snail that you can drag around the screen, leaving a trail of rainbow goo. Useful? Not really. Fun? Definitely.
In the app, you can scroll through a TikTok-like feed filled with interactive content instead of videos. Popular posts on the platform appear to have tens of thousands of likes.
One LinkedIn post about Gizmo described the app as if "Lovable and TikTok had a baby." Another post described it as a "TikTok for vibe-coded toy apps."
The New York-based startup raised about $5.48 million from investors, according to a 2025 SEC filing. VC funds First Round Capital and Uncommon Projects both list Atma Sciences as a portfolio investment.
Gizmo is one of several vibe-coding tools that use AI to create mini apps and have gained traction in the tech scene over the past year. Wabi, a mini app platform, announced a $20 million pre-seed investment in late 2025. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian led a $9.4 million seed investment in the vibe-coding app Vibecode.
Meta's spokesperson confirmed that the Atma Sciences team will report into Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL) unit, which is led by Scale AI's Alexandr Wang and ex-Github CEO Nat Friedman.
Meta has made several recent plays to snag AI talent. Last year, it took a major stake in Scale AI and acquired the Singapore-based agentic AI company, Manus.
It's not yet clear, however, what the fate of the current Gizmo app will be, or what the Atma Sciences team will be focused on building at Meta.
It's easy to imagine a product like Gizmo somewhere within the Meta ecosystem. Meta, like many other tech companies, is racing to develop scalable consumer AI applications that could usher in a new era for social media.
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