Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.
Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence startup that has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it instantly went viral. The video showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, schedule vacations and analyze stock portfolios. Manus then claimed to have outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
By April, just weeks after launch, 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 mediaa number of other big backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) through an earlier $10 million round.
Although Bloomberg raised questions when Manus began charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted that the pricing seemed “somewhat aggressive . . . for a subscription service that is still in the trial phase”) of the company recently announced Since then it had signed up millions of users and exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
It was then that Meta began to negotiate with Manus, according to the WSJwhich says Meta is paying $2 billion — the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next round of funding.
For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that actually makes money (investors have grown increasingly skittish about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spending spree).
Meta says it will keep Manus operating independently while integrating its agents on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.
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However, there is one aspect, which is that Manus, which launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who set up parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before landing in Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether this raises flags in Washington remains to be seen, but Sen. John Cornyn has already pulled Benchmark over its investment in the company, asking May at X who thought it was “a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest rival in artificial intelligence, only for the CCP to 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 the most vocal hawks in Congress on China competition and technology, but he is not alone. Being tough on China has become one of the real bipartisan issues in Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Meta has already done so Nikkei Asia said that after the acquisition, Manus will have no ties to Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no continuing Chinese ownership interests in Manus AI after the transaction and Manus AI will cease its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the agency.
