Meta just bought Manus, an AI startup everyone has been talking about

Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.

Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that has become the talk of Silicon Valley since it emerged this spring with a demo video so slick it immediately went viral. The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen applicants, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.

In April, just weeks after launch, early-stage company Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media channelssome other major backers had already invested in Manus at the time, including Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) through an earlier $10 million round.

Although Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 per month for access to its AI models (the outlet brand noted that the prices “somewhat aggressive . . . for a membership service that is still in a testing phase,” the company said recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Then Meg began to bargain with Manus, according to the WSJstating that Meta will pay $2 billion – the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next round of funding.

For Zuckerberg, who has based Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that actually makes money (investors have become increasingly nervous about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spend).

Meta says it will run Manus independently while interweaving its agents with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

There’s one problem, though: Manus, which launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who set up parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before moving to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether this will attract attention in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn already dragged Benchmark to the side for his investment in the company. asked back on X in May who thought it was “a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest adversary in AI, only to have the CCP 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 Congress’ most outspoken hawks on China and technology competition, but he is hardly alone. Getting tough on China has become one of the truly bipartisan issues in Congress.

It’s not surprising that Meta has already done that told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus will no longer have ties with Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no further 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 newspaper.