Manus, the Singapore-based AI agent developer, has been acquired by Meta for an undisclosed sum, because the social media large steps up spending to shut the hole with rivals reminiscent of Google and OpenAI.
Initially based in China, Manus has since shifted its base to Singapore and earlier this yr, made its debut with a general-purpose AI agent – LLM-powered methods that may autonomously navigate the online and full duties on behalf of the consumer. Manus was a part of the wave of Chinese language AI startups that sprouted and sparked buzz within the wake of DeepSeek’s triumph, drawing consideration for growing AI brokers able to executing complicated ‘basic’ duties reminiscent of market analysis, coding, and knowledge evaluation.
Meta’s acquisition of Manus is geared toward accelerating AI innovation for companies and integrating superior automation into its shopper and enterprise merchandise, together with its Meta AI assistant, the social media large stated in a press release on Monday, December 29.
The takeover won’t have an effect on Manus’ paid clients because the startup will proceed working its subscription service with out disruption. Meta additionally stated that Manus’ workers will probably be folded into its groups, with the tech large having aggressively poached AI expertise from startups and main rivals, together with OpenAI and Google, this yr.
Manus is getting into the subsequent chapter: we’re becoming a member of forces with Meta to take basic brokers to the subsequent stage.
Full story on our weblog: https://t.co/huPrnbITCi
— Manus (@ManusAI) December 29, 2025
Meta’s transfer to snap up Manus suits squarely with its broader technique of utilizing its monetary firepower to scoop up expertise and purchase capabilities with the intention to acquire an edge over rivals within the AI arms race. Firstly of December 2025, Meta introduced – with out disclosing the quantity – that it has acquired an AI-wearables startup referred to as Limitless (previously Rewind) that developed an AI-powered pendant to document customers’ conversations.
Maybe its greatest guess got here in June 2025, when the Mark Zuckerberg-led firm invested over $14.3 billion in Scale AI and concurrently employed co-founder Alexandr Wang in addition to different workers of the information labelling startup to be a part of its newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) – a separate unit throughout the firm that has been tasked with pursuing Zuckerberg’s lofty imaginative and prescient of ‘private superintelligence’.
A time period coined by the CEO himself, private superintelligence is used to consult with AI methods that would ultimately surpass human capabilities whereas serving to folks use these superior methods to attain their private targets.
One key distinction between the Meta-Scale AI deal and its purchases of Manus and Limitless is that the previous suits a wave of acqui-hires that swept by the tech trade this yr, with different massive tech corporations reminiscent of Google (Character AI), Amazon (Adept), and Microsoft (Inflection AI) trying to safe AI expertise and buy belongings in lateral strikes slightly than conventional, full-scale takeovers.
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Commenting on the acquisition, Meta stated, “Manus is already serving the every day wants of hundreds of thousands of customers and companies worldwide…We plan to scale this service to many extra companies.” “Becoming a member of Meta permits us to construct on a stronger, extra sustainable basis with out altering how Manus works or how selections are made,” Xiao Hong, CEO of Manus, stated in a press launch.
Past the character of those offers, Meta’s acquisition of an agentic AI startup comes close to the top of 2025, which was anticipated to be the yr that AI brokers took off, however the surge of their utilization or adoption by enterprises is but to totally arrive. A number of consultants reminiscent of Andrej Karpathy, a famed AI researcher, have additionally questioned the progress of AI brokers.
What’s Manus? What’s the buzz round it?
Manus’ roots will be traced again to a Chinese language startup referred to as Butterfly Impact, also referred to as Monica.Im, earlier than it was spun off and have become a standalone firm. The startup first grabbed headlines with the launch of its general-purpose AI agent, with demos on its web site displaying how the AI agent can be utilized to perform complicated duties reminiscent of shopping for actual property and programming video video games.
Reactions to the rollout of Manus’ AI agent have been overwhelmingly constructive with the top of product at Hugging Face calling it “essentially the most spectacular AI device I’ve ever tried.” AI coverage researcher Dean Ball stated that Manus was the “most refined laptop utilizing AI.”
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In a viral video posted on X, Yichao ‘Peak’ Ji, the chief AI scientist at Manus, “[Manus] isn’t simply one other chatbot or workflow. It’s a totally autonomous agent that bridges the hole between conception and execution […] We see it as the subsequent paradigm of human-machine collaboration.”
The startup claimed that its AI agent outperforms OpenAI’s Deep Analysis and Operator instruments on a preferred benchmark for basic AI assistants referred to as GAIA, which evaluated an AI agent’s skill to hold out work by shopping the online, utilizing software program, and extra. Nonetheless, early reviews on social media prompt that Manus’ AI agent shouldn’t be powered by an LLM developed from scratch and is as a substitute, wrapped round a mixture of current and fine-tuned AI fashions, together with Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen. In March 2025, Manus introduced a strategic partnership with Alibaba’s Qwen AI workforce.
“Behind each Manus session runs a devoted cloud-based digital machine, permitting customers to orchestrate complicated cloud workloads — just by speaking to an agent,” as per the corporate. “From producing tailor-made rental displays to soundly evaluating cutting-edge open-source initiatives in a safe sandbox, the Turing-completeness of the digital machine is what provides Manus its generality — and opens the door to limitless inventive potentialities,” it stated.
Manus stated that it has processed greater than 147 trillion tokens of textual content and knowledge up to now, and presently runs over 80 million cloud-based digital computer systems on high of its large-scale virtualisation infrastructure and ‘extremely environment friendly’ agent structure which reportedly took “months of optimisation”.
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The corporate made one other splash within the crowded AI product market with Large Analysis, a device that that ropes in scores of AI brokers with the intention to perform complicated, large-scale duties that require data on tons of of things. Not like specialised AI agent managers or coding assistants, Manus has claimed that its AI brokers are able to finishing up general-purpose duties.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions between the USA and China in July this yr, Manus shifted its operations from China to Singapore, Tokyo, and San Mateo in California. It doesn’t supply its AI merchandise and instruments in China, in response to a report by Bloomberg. Earlier than transferring its headquarters to Singapore, Manus reportedly laid off most of its workers in Beijing.
In October 2025, Microsoft started testing Manus’ AI agent in Home windows 11 PCs, permitting customers to create web sites from native recordsdata.
The AI startup raised $75 million in a Collection B funding spherical led by US enterprise agency Benchmark at a $500 million valuation. Its early buyers embrace Chinese language tech giants reminiscent of Tencent in addition to HSG (previously Sequoia China) and ZhenFund. The corporate claimed it had achieved an annualised common income of greater than $100 million eight months after launch, whereas its income run fee exceeded $125 million, as per a report by CNBC.