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•December 31, 2025College dropout like Zuckerberg: Manus co-founder; Meta pays $2.5B for AI startup
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NeowinMeta has acquired the general-purpose AI agent platform Manus AI for an undisclosed amount, with plans to integrate the technology into its ecosystem. Read more...
SlashdotMeta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round. Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says 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's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everythingMeta has acquired an AI startup called Manus — known for its custom research and website-building agents — in a deal valued at more than $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal . It's reportedly one of the largest acquisitions yet involving a startup nurtured in China's AI ecosystem. Manus arrived in March 2025, shortly after another Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek appeared on the scene. The company (called Butterfly Effect at the time) originally described it as "the first general AI agent" to perform complex tasks autonomously, rather than just generating ideas. It draws from several third-party models, particularly Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and versions of Alibaba's Qwen. Manus is designed to automate certain tasks, like market research, coding, sales data analysis and website cloning and creation. (However, one skeptic called it "a product devilishly optimized for influencers, which is why it exploded so much.") The company claims that Manu is "already serving the daily needs of millions of users and businesses" and has an annualized average revenue of more than $100 million only eight months after launch. Manus laid off most of its Beijing employees this summer before moving its headquarters to Singapore in an effort to expand globally.The company was reportedly seeking a funding round that would have valued it at $2 billion when it was approached by Meta. "Joining Meta allows us to build on a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing how Manus works or how decisions are made," said Manus CEO Xiao Hong in a company news release . This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-buys-startup-known-for-its-ai-task-automation-agents-140045275.html?src=rss