Mark Zuckerberg strikes again.
Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that has been making waves in Silicon Valley since it debuted last spring with a demo video showing an AI agent doing things like screening candidates, planning vacations and analyzing stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
In April, just weeks after its launch, venture capital firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million and saw Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta join the startup’s board of directors. By Chinese mediaother high-profile backers had already invested in Manus by that time, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China) via a $10 million seed round.
The company announcement as of mid-December, it has since signed up millions of users and generates annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million from monthly and annual subscribers to its membership service.
It was at this time that Meta began to negotiate with Manus, according to the WSJwhich claims the tech giant is paying $2 billion – the valuation Manus is 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 actually makes money. This is particularly relevant given that investors are increasingly nervous about Meta’s $60 billion in infrastructure spending and the tech industry’s debt-backed spending as a whole on building data centers.
Meta says this will allow Manus to operate independently and integrate 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’s a catch, though: Manus’ Chinese founders founded its parent company, Butterfly Effect, in Beijing in 2022, before decamping to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether this will cause concern in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn has already dragged Benchmark for its investment in the company, breeding in May, concerns about the transfer of American capital to a Chinese company.
Cornyn, a Texas Republican and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of Congress’ most vocal hawks on China and technology competition, but he is not the only one. Getting tough on China has become one of the few truly bipartisan issues in Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Meta has already told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus will no longer have any links with Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no further Chinese participation in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will cease its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.