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

Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.

Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singaporean AI startup that has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it was created this spring with a video so impressive it went viral. The video showed an AI assistant that can act like a job seeker in photos, plan vacations, and analyze stocks. Manus said at the time that it won OpenAI’s Comprehensive Research.

By April, just weeks after its launch, startup firm Benchmark led a $75 million round of funding that gave Manus a $500 million valuation. General Partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the team. In Chinese media mediaSome prominent investors had already invested in Manus at that time, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) through a $10 million round.

Even Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted that the prices appeared to be “somewhat aggressive . . . for the membership service is still experimental,”) the company has been announced recently it also signed up millions of users and exceeded $100 million in annual revenue.

That’s when Meta started talking to Manus, according to the WSJwhich says Meta is paying $2 billion – the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next investment.

For Zuckerberg, who has confused the future of Meta on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that makes money (investors have increased significantly due to Meta’s investment of $ 60 billion).

Meta says it will make Manus autonomous while weaving its assistants into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta’s chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

There is one wrinkle, however, and that is that Manus, which was founded eight months ago, has Chinese founders who founded Butterfly Effect’s parent company in Beijing in 2022 before moving to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether this will raise a flag in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn has already pulled Benchmark for its investment in the company, I will ask again in May on X who thought it was “a good idea for American investors to fund our arch-enemy’s AI, for the CCP to use this technology against us economically and militarily? Not me.”

Cornyn, a Texas Republican and senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been one of the most outspoken figures in Congress on China and technology competition, but he is not alone. Being tough on China has been one of the most common issues with Congress.

Unsurprisingly, Meta already is he told Nikkei Asia that upon acquisition, Manus will have no relationship with Chinese investors and will no longer work in China. “There will be no further Chinese ownership interest in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will cease operations and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the site.