Meta to acquire Singapore startup Manus in bid to bolster AI push

By Kurt Wagner

 

Meta Platforms Inc. has agreed to acquire Singapore-based startup Manus, adding a popular artificial intelligence agent as the social-media company works to build a business around its massive AI investment. 

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made AI his company’s top priority, and is spending billions to hire researchers, build data centers and develop new models. Manus, which had an annual revenue run rate of $125 million earlier this year, sells an AI agent to businesses via a subscription service, which could give Meta a more immediate return on some of its AI investment. No financial terms were disclosed.

 

 

Manus released its product earlier this year, a so-called AI agent that can complete a handful of general tasks, including screening resumes, creating trip itineraries and analyzing stocks in response to basic instructions. The parent company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect — which was founded in China before moving to Singapore — raised money earlier this year at close to a $500 million valuation in an investment round led by US venture capital firm Benchmark.

 

Meta is spending aggressively to compete in the AI race against rivals like OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Zuckerberg has pledged to spend $600 billion on US infrastructure projects over the next three years, many of them expected to be AI-related. The company has hired an expensive team of researchers to develop a new state-of-the-art AI model it plans to debut next spring, and has faced some skepticism from investors who worry that Meta’s spending won’t result in meaningful revenue anytime soon. 

 

AI agents are tools that don’t need human supervision to perform specific digital tasks. Enterprise software companies such as Salesforce Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. have heavily promoted their versions of agents as the most effective way for businesses to use the emerging technology, rather than generative AI features such as chatbots, which require user prompts.

 

In a statement Monday, Meta said it will continue to operate and sell Manus’ service, and will integrate the startup’s agents into its consumer and business products. Meta already has an AI chatbot, Meta AI, which is available through the company’s social media and messaging platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — in addition to its AI glasses.

 

Meta is acquiring the technology and leadership group from Manus, though the companies didn’t say where the new team will sit within the  organization. The company’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, joined Meta this summer as part of a high-profile investment into his startup, Scale AI.

 

Following the announcement, Wang posted on X welcoming the Manus team to Meta, and in his own post Manus co-founder and CEO Xiao Hong said that the deal would help his company expand the reach of its agents. “The era of AI that doesn’t just talk, but acts, creates, and delivers, is only beginning,” he wrote. “And now, we get to build it at a scale we never could have imagined.”

 

VC firm Benchmark was criticized earlier this year by lawmakers and other venture investors for backing an AI company with ties to China. “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,” US Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, wrote in a post on X in May. Benchmark didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Meta deal Monday.