Meta is buying Manus, the AI ​​company that went viral this year

Meta Platforms is buying Manus. No, we are not talking about the final boss of the Dark Souls DLC, but about a startup dedicated to Artificial Intelligence based in Singapore.

Manus has become famous in spring 2025 when it released a demo of its AI, which can do things like analyze job candidates, plan vacations, and check a company’s stock portfolio. At the time, Manus claimed that his technology was capable of achieving results superior to OpenAI’s Deep Research.

The evolution of Manus over the months

By April, within weeks of launch, venture capital firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. Additionally, general partner Chetan Puttagunta has joined the board of directors. According to Chinese media, by then other prominent investors had already invested in Manus, including Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), via an earlier $10 million round.

Manus started charging $39 to $199 a month for access to its AI models, and the company recently announced that it had acquired millions of users and exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That’s when Meta began negotiating with Manus, the WSJ reported, which says Meta is paying $2 billion, the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round.

Meta states that will keep Manus operating independentlybut integrating its AI agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s proprietary chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

We also remember that Meta wants to surpass X: the integration of podcasts directly into the Threads feed is coming.