Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.
Meta Platforms acquires Singapore-based AI startup Manus. Manus has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it was brought to life in the spring with a highly slick demo video that went viral. The clip showed an AI agent that can screen job applicants, plan vacations, analyze stock portfolios, and more. Manas claimed at the time that it had surpassed OpenAI’s Deep Research.
By April, just weeks after launching, early-stage company Benchmark had led a $75 million funding round, giving Manas a post-money valuation of $500 million. General Partner Chetan Puttagunta has joined the Board of Directors. Other prominent backers had already invested in Manus in a previous $10 million round at that time, including Tencent, Genfund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China), according to Chinese media.
Although Bloomberg raised questions when Manas started charging monthly fees of $39 or $199 for access to its AI models (the news outlet noted that its pricing “appears to be somewhat aggressive for a membership service still in testing”), the company recently announced that it has since signed up millions of users and generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
That’s when Meta began negotiations with Manas, which said it would pay $2 billion, the same valuation Manas was seeking for its next round of funding, according to WSJ.
For Zuckerberg, who is betting Meta’s future on AI, Manas represents something new: an AI product that’s actually profitable (investors are increasingly nervous about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure investment).
Meta says its own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users, while continuing to operate Manus independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
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One problem, however, is that Manas, which was founded eight months ago, has Chinese founders who founded the parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before relocating to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether that will spark a backlash in Washington remains to be seen, but Sen. John Cornyn has already delayed investing in Benchmark, asking X back in May: “I think it’s a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest adversary in AI, but do you think it’s a good idea for the Chinese Communist Party to use that technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me.”
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 truly bipartisan issues in Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Mehta has already told Nikkei Asia that Manus will not have any relationship with Chinese investors after the acquisition and will no longer operate in China. “Following the transaction, there will be no continued Chinese ownership of Manus AI, and Manus AI will discontinue its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.
