Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta says it has agreed to acquire Manus, a fast-growing AI startup with Chinese roots now based in Singapore, in a deal valued at more than $2 billion, according to multiple reports. The latest move underscores two big trends: the massive scale of AI spending among Silicon Valley companies, and the geopolitical sensitivities around companies and startups founded in China.
Manus, in case you’re unfamiliar, builds so‑called AI “agents” that can carry out complex digital tasks for consumers and businesses. The idea here is that Manus will essentially fold its technology into Meta’s products, including the Meta AI assistant that runs across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The deal marks one of the first major instances of a key player in U.S. tech buying a startup founded in China, making it somewhat of a litmus test for cross-border deals of this kind—especially in the AI space.
Manus launched just three years ago, in 2022. It started as a project from Butterfly Effect, a.k.a. Monica.im, a startup that was based in Beijing before it moved its headquarters to Singapore earlier this year as it looks to expand globally. Manus’s AI agent, notably, can screen résumés, plan trips, analyze stock portfolios, and handle other multistep jobs with minimal human input, positioning it as a kind of virtual colleague rather than a simple chatbot.
Manus has seen explosive growth in its brief life so far. Just a little over a week ago, Manus released a blog post claiming it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue and achieved a $125 million run rate, thanks largely to subscriptions and power users. The company also says Microsoft tested Manus on Windows 11 PCs this year to help users build websites and other content from their local files.
The big picture for Meta
For Meta, the Manus deal is the latest in a series of multibillion‑dollar bets aimed at turning heavy infrastructure spending on AI chips and data centers into commercially viable products. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called AI the company’s top priority: Meta continues to invest heavily in its Llama family of open‑source language models, and made a large strategic investment in Scale AI earlier this year, even bringing on the startup’s 28-year-old billionaire founder Alexandr Wang to lead Meta’s broader AI efforts.
The acquisition also untangles Manus’s ownership ties to China. While the startup has received backing from Chinese investors such as Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China), a Meta spokesperson told Nikkei Asia: “There will be no continuing Chinese ownership interests in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will discontinue its services and operations in China.” A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Of course, this move to disentangle Manus from China should help Meta avoid the eye and ire of U.S. politicians and regulators. John Cornyn, the 73-year-old Republican senator from Texas, slammed U.S. VC firm Benchmark Capital back in May for joining a $75 million funding round for Manus, asking and answering a hypothetical question on X: “Who thinks it is 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.”
Manus’s founder and CEO, Xiao Hong, framed the sale as a way to scale the technology globally. “The era of AI that not only talks but also acts, creates, and delivers is just beginning,” he said on social media, according to Al Jazeera. “Now, we have the opportunity to build it at a scale we could never have envisioned.”
Meta has said it will keep the Manus service running while integrating the team of roughly 100 employees into its broader AI organization.