Meta just bought Manus, an AI startup everyone has been talking about
Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.
Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that’s become the talk of Silicon Valley since it debuted last spring with a demo video that showed an AI agent doing things like screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
In April, just weeks after launch, venture capital firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million and saw Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta joining the startup’s board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via a $10 million round.
The company announced in mid-December that it has since signed up millions of users and is generating annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million from monthly and yearly subscribers to its membership service.
It was around this time that Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says the tech giant is paying $2 billion — the valuation Manus was reportedly seeking for its next funding round.
For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that’s actually making money. This is especially pertinent given that investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spending spree, and the broader tech industry’s debt-backed expenditures on data center construction.
Meta says it’ll keep Manus running independently and weave the startup’s AI agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta’s own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.
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There is one wrinkle, however: Manus’ Chinese founders founded its parent company, Butterfly Effect, in Beijing in 2022, before decamping to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether that raises flags in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn has already dragged Benchmark for its investment in the company, raising concerns back in May about American capital going to a Chinese concern.
Cornyn, a Texas Republican and senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of Congress’ most vocal hawks on China and technology competition, but he’s hardly alone. Being tough on China has become one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues in Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Meta has already told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus won’t have any ties to Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no continuing Chinese ownership interests in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will discontinue its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.
Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.
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