Mark Zuckerberg has made another significant move.
Meta Platforms is set to acquire Manus, an AI startup based in Singapore that garnered considerable attention in Silicon Valley following its debut last spring. Manus showcased a demo video featuring an AI agent capable of tasks such as screening job applicants, organizing travel plans, and analyzing investment portfolios, asserting at the time that its performance surpassed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
In April, only weeks post-launch, venture capital firm Benchmark spearheaded a $75 million funding round, valuing Manus at $500 million post-money, which also saw Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta join the startup’s board. According to Chinese media reports, Manus had already secured a $10 million investment from other notable backers, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China).
The company announced in mid-December that it had amassed millions of users and was generating over $100 million in annual recurring revenue from its monthly and yearly membership subscriptions.
It was during this period that Meta initiated negotiations with Manus, as reported by the WSJ. The publication indicated that Meta is paying $2 billion, a valuation Manus was reportedly aiming for in its subsequent funding round.
For Zuckerberg, who has heavily invested Meta’s future in AI, Manus represents a novel achievement: an AI product that is actively profitable. This is particularly relevant as investors have grown increasingly uneasy about Meta’s extensive $60 billion infrastructure expenditure and the broader tech industry’s debt-financed investments in data center development.
Meta has stated its intention to operate Manus independently while integrating the startup’s AI agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta’s proprietary chatbot, Meta AI, is already accessible to users.
However, a complication arises: Manus’s Chinese founders established its parent company, Butterfly Effect, in Beijing in 2022 before relocating to Singapore midway through the current year. It remains to be seen whether this will raise concerns in Washington, especially given that Senator John Cornyn previously criticized Benchmark for its investment in the company, expressing worries in May about American capital funding a Chinese entity.
Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has consistently been among Congress’s most vocal critics of China and technology competition. He is not alone, as a firm stance on China has become a genuinely bipartisan issue in Congress.
Predictably, Meta has already informed Nikkei Asia that following the acquisition, Manus will sever all ties with Chinese investors and cease operations in China. A Meta spokesperson told the outlet, “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.”