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 materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral. The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the 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 an earlier $10 million round.
Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed “somewhat aggressive . . . for a membership service still in a testing phase,”) the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
That’s when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion — the same valuation Manus was 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 (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spending spree).
Meta says it’ll keep Manus running independently while weaving its 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, which is that Manus, which launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who founded 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 already dragged Benchmark for its investment in the company, asking back in May on X who thought it was “a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest adversary in AI, only to have the CCP use that technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me.”
Cornyn, a Texas Republican and senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of Congress’s most vocal hawks on China and technology competition, but he’s hardly alone. Being tough on China has become one of the 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.