“The news is out, and it’s big: Manus is joining Meta“. This is how the official statement from the Singapore-based artificial intelligence startup begins, announcing its acquisition by Mark Zuckerberg’s technology company. While the financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal have stated that sources close to both organizations indicated a figure exceeding 2 billion dollars.
Meta’s move is as unexpected as it is risky, and it lays bare the company’s concern about staying ahead in the race to achieve Artificial General Intelligence, an area in which Manus has been showcasing its capabilities since its founding in March 2025.
Although neither Meta nor Manus have officially confirmed the amount, the transaction was reportedly closed for around 2 billion dollars, a sum that aligns with the valuation the startup was targeting for its next funding round and quadruples the 500 million dollars post-money valuation achieved just weeks after its launch, following a 75 million dollar round led by Benchmark.
In practical terms, Meta secures an asset that already generates over 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and has a total revenue run rate exceeding 125 million dollars, just eight months after its commercial debut. This would make Manus the fastest startup globally to reach 100 million in ARR from zero.
On the competitive landscape, this move puts pressure on OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the area of general-purpose autonomous agents, a segment where Manus had claimed to outperform tools such as OpenAI’s Deep Research in complex research tasks. For Meta, integrating an agent that already operates as an “execution layer” of AI in real-world environments is a rapid way to strengthen its general-purpose agent strategy against competitors still focused on foundational models and chatbots, rather than end-to-end automation.
The transaction is accompanied by political controversy: the Chinese heritage of the founders — who established the parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before relocating to Singapore — had triggered alarms in Washington to the extent that Republican Senator John Cornyn publicly criticized the fact that American capital was funding “our main adversary in AI.” To address regulatory challenges, Meta has announced to Nikkei Asia that following the transaction, Manus will no longer have Chinese ownership and will suspend its services and operations in China in an effort to safeguard the acquisition from potential national security objections in the United States.
From a corporate perspective, the company will continue operating from Singapore, with a team of approximately 105 individuals based in Singapore, Tokyo, and San Francisco, and plans to open an office in Paris, while maintaining its subscription service through its website and app (plans starting at 20 euros per month). Meta has indicated that Manus will continue to operate independently, while its agents will be gradually integrated into consumer and business products such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Meta AI itself, with the goal of scaling the solution to millions of businesses and billions of users.
Part of the appeal (and the hype) surrounding Manus relates to the inner workings of its technology. Its flagship product is a general-purpose autonomous AI agent designed to complete tasks and deliver final outcomes, not just respond to questions. It operates on a proprietary “virtual computer” with internet access, a persistent file system, and the ability to install software and create custom tools. The concept is that users can delegate market research, programming, or data analysis projects from start to finish, while the agent plans, executes, and delivers work products ready for production — “as if it were a virtual colleague with its own machine.”
Since its launch, Manus has processed more than 147 trillion tokens and has created over 80 million “virtual computers,” illustrating the volume of tasks it is already managing in real-world settings. The company prides itself on growing by more than 20% month-over-month since the release of Manus 1.5, supported by innovations such as Wide Research—designed for broad and structured research—and an approach that has popularized so-called “context engineering” for AI agents, which the company claims has become an industry standard.
The key to Manus lies in its integrations: the agent can connect with Gmail, Notion, Stripe, HubSpot, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Drive, GitHub, Hugging Face and other services by means of MCP connectors (an open standard designed to connect AI assistants with external tools) that are pre-built, and also with internal systems through customized MCP servers. Based on this, the platform serves as a central orchestration layer for the user’s digital environment, capable of reading data from different applications, performing actions across various platforms, and delivering results directly into existing workflows, eliminating the need to copy and paste information.
In addition to native connectors, Manus offers integration with Zapier to chain automations triggered by events and with Slack to send notifications, updates, and results directly to team channels. It also provides a proprietary API for integration into custom software. In practice, this enables use cases such as automated reporting, creation of multi-app tasks, data synchronization between internal CRMs and external tools, or the generation of mobile apps from natural language — all triggered from a single prompt.
Photo: Manus.
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