Financial details of the deal to acquire the five-year-old Denver-based firm were not disclosed.

"We're excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables," a Meta spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a priority at the tech giant with a stated aim of achieving "superintelligence."

AI is being used to enhance Meta apps including Facebook and Instagram, and to ramp up capabilities of smartglasses it makes in partnership with EssilorLuxottica.

"Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables," Limitless co-founder and Chief Executive Dan Siroker said in a message posted on the startup's website.

"We share this vision and we'll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life."

Limitless has raised a total of $33 million from investors including venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, according to Pitchbook.

The startup was valued at $368 million during its latest funding round in 2023, Pitchbook noted.

"We're no longer working on a weird fringe idea," Siroker said of how the tech world has changed since the startup's early days.

"We're building a future that now seems inevitable."

To pursue his AI ambitions, Zuckerberg has launched an aggressive recruitment campaign, attracting executives from OpenAI, Apple and Google with multibillion-dollar offers.

Meta invested heavily in Scale AI earlier this year, poaching the startup's co-founder Alexandr Wang as part of the deal and putting him in charge of a newly formed unit called Superintelligence Labs.

The deal to buy Limitless appears to be the first major acquisition by Meta since it finalized its buyout of virtual reality firm Within Unlimited in 2023, after a court rejected an attempt by US regulators to block the deal over competition concerns.

The courtroom loss was seen as a setback for then-FTC head Lina Khan, who was an advocate of imposing tougher scrutiny on Big Tech companies on antitrust matters.