Meta just bought Manus, the AI ​​startup everyone is talking about

Mark Zuckerberg strikes again.

Meta Platforms has acquired Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that has been 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. Manos 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, which gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million, and saw Benchmark’s general partner, Chetan Puttagunta, join the startup’s board. According to Chinese media, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China) through a $10 million round.

The company announced in mid-December that it has since signed up millions of users and generates more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue from monthly and annual subscribers to its membership service.

Around this time, Meta began negotiating with Manos, according to the Wall Street Journal, which says the tech giant is paying $2 billion — the valuation Manos was reportedly seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has bet the future of meta on AI, Manos represents something new: an AI product that actually makes money. This is especially important given that investors have become increasingly nervous about Meta’s $60 billion spending spree on infrastructure, and the broader technology industry’s debt-backed spending on building data centers.

Meta says it will keep Manus operating independently and will integrate the startup’s AI agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

However, there is one problem: Manos’ Chinese founders founded its parent company, Butterfly Effect, in Beijing in 2022, before heading to Singapore in the middle of this year. It remains to be seen whether that raises flags in Washington, but Senator John Cornyn has already divested Benchmark of its investments in the company, raising concerns last May about US capital going to a Chinese company.

Cornyn, a Texas Republican and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of the most vocal hawks in Congress on China and technology competition, but he is not alone. Getting tough on China has become one of the few issues with truly bipartisan traction in Congress.

Unsurprisingly, Meta has already told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manos will no longer have any relationships with 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 cease its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.