Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms has agreed to acquire AI startup Manus, a Singaporean company with Chinese founders that conducts in-depth research and performs other tasks for paying users, The Wall Street Journal reports, writes UNN.
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According to sources familiar with the deal, Meta is closing the deal for over $2 billion. As some sources reported, when Meta approached the startup, Manus was seeking a new funding round with a valuation of $2 billion.
As TechCrunch notes, Singaporean AI startup Manus has been the talk of Silicon Valley since its emergence this spring, thanks to a demo video "so sophisticated it instantly went viral."
The video showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus then claimed to have surpassed OpenAI's Deep Research.
By April, just weeks after its launch, early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that valued Manus at $500 million. General Partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board of directors. According to Chinese media, some other prominent backers had already invested in Manus at that time, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) through a previous $10 million round.
While Bloomberg raised questions when Manus began charging $39 or $199 per month for access to its AI models (the publication noted that the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a subscription service that is still in testing"), the company recently announced that it has since registered millions of users and exceeded $100 million in annual revenue.
That's when Meta began talks with Manus, the WSJ reports.
"For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus is something new: an AI product that actually makes money (investors are increasingly nervous about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending)," TechCrunch points out.
Meta indicated that Manus will maintain independent operations while integrating its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.
However, there's a catch: Manus, launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who established the parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 and then moved 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 criticized Benchmark for investing in the company, asking on X in May: who thought it was "a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest AI adversary for the CCP to use this technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me."
Unsurprisingly, Meta has already informed Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus will have no ties to Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. "Following this deal, Chinese ownership stakes in Manus AI will no longer remain, and Manus AI will cease its services and operations in China," a Meta spokesperson told the publication.