Meta has just acquired Manus, an AI startup that everyone is talking about

Mark Zuckerberg strikes again.

Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that’s been the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it instantly 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 its launch, startup Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta has joined the board of directors. By Chinese mediaother high-profile backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China) via a previous $10 million funding round.

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

It was at this point that Meta began to negotiate with Manus, according to the WSJwhich indicates Meta is paying $2 billion – the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that actually makes money (investors are growing nervous about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spending).

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

There is one problem though, which is that Manus, launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who founded parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before decamping to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether this will raise concern in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn has already dragged Benchmark for its investment in the company, I ask in May on X 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 ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of Congress’ most vocal hawks on China and technology competition, but he is not the only one. Being tough on China has become one of the truly bipartisan issues in Congress.

Unsurprisingly, Meta has already told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus will no longer have any links with Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no further Chinese participation in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will cease its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.