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

Mark Zuckerberg strikes again.

Meta Platforms has acquired Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it debuted this spring with a demo video that instantly went viral. The clip showed an AI agent that can do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manos claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.

By April, just weeks after its launch, Benchmark led an early-stage $75 million funding round, which gave Manos a post-money valuation of $500 million. General Partner Chetan Puttagunta has joined the Board of Directors. For every Chinese MediaSome other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia China) through a previous $10 million 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 pricing seemed “Somewhat aggressive . . . For a membership service that is still in the testing phase) the company Recently announced It has since signed up millions of users and has exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

That’s when Meta began negotiating with Manos, According to the Wall Street Journalwhich says Meta is paying $2 billion — the same valuation Manos was seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has bet 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 spending spree on infrastructure).

Meta says it will keep Manus operating independently while integrating its agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

There is one problem, however, which is that Manus, which launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who founded parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before moving to Singapore in the middle of this year. It remains to be seen whether that raises flags in Washington, but Sen. John Cornyn has already pulled Benchmark out of its investment in the company. he asked back in May on X Who thought it was “a good idea for American investors to support our biggest opponent in the field of artificial intelligence, only 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 Congress’s most vocal hawks on China and technology competition, but he’s not alone. Getting tough on China has become a bipartisan issue in Congress.

Not surprisingly, Meta has already done so Nikki Asia said That after the acquisition, Manos will no longer have any relationships with Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no continuing 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 outlet.