Meta to acquire Singapore-based startup Manus, adding agents to bolster AI bet

[SAN FRANCISCO] Meta Platforms has agreed to acquire Singapore-based startup Manus, adding a popular artificial intelligence (AI) 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 centres and develop new models. Manus, which had an annual revenue run rate of US$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 analysing 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 US$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 such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft Zuckerberg has pledged to spend US$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 scepticism from investors who worry that Meta’s spending won’t result in meaningful revenue anytime soon.

AI agents are tools that do not need human supervision to perform specific digital tasks. Enterprise software companies such as Salesforce and ServiceNow 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 on Monday, Meta said that 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.

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Meta is acquiring the technology and leadership group from Manus, though the companies did not say where the new team will sit within the organisation. 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 does not 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 criticised 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 subsidise 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 did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Meta deal on Monday. BLOOMBERG