According to TechSpot, Meta Platforms has agreed to acquire the Singapore-based AI startup Manus in a deal valued at over $2 billion. The startup, which launched its AI agent in March 2025, gained millions of users within months and disclosed an extraordinary $100 million in annual recurring revenue by December. Manus’s system can generate detailed research reports and build customized websites, drawing on AI models from both US firms like Anthropic and Chinese companies like Alibaba. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Xiao Hong (known as Red), will join Meta and report to COO Javier Olivan. This acquisition marks one of the largest purchases by a US tech giant of an AI product from Asia, as Meta aggressively plays catch-up in the AI agent race against Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
Meta is buying speed and global talent
Here’s the thing: Meta isn’t just buying a cool product. It’s buying velocity. Manus went from zero to $100 million in annual revenue in about eight months. That’s a trajectory you can’t easily replicate internally, no matter how many billions you throw at the problem. For a company like Meta, which has faced delays with its own next-gen AI model, this is a shortcut to a proven, revenue-generating service it can immediately scale to its massive business user base. But the talent and structure are just as crucial. They’re bringing in the entire founding team and keeping the platform operational, which is a smart move to avoid killing the golden goose.
The hybrid tech stack is the real story
Technically, Manus is fascinating because it’s a geopolitical artifact. The company positioned its headquarters in Singapore, with most of its research and engineering talent remaining in China. This global posture, as noted in a report by the South China Morning Post, was strategic. It allowed them to access top American AI models like those from Anthropic, which are restricted in China, while leveraging deep Chinese engineering talent. The resulting agent is a kind of “best of both worlds” system, at least from a technical sourcing perspective. For Meta, this isn’t just an AI acquisition; it’s a direct pipeline to a unique, hybrid engineering culture and a different approach to model orchestration that they likely don’t have in-house.
A new front in the AI wars
So what does this mean for the broader AI landscape? It signals that the battle is moving decisively from foundational models to agentic applications. Microsoft has Copilot deeply integrated into Windows and Office. Google has its Gemini assistants everywhere. OpenAI is pushing hard with ChatGPT as a platform. Meta’s consumer-facing AI efforts, while present in Instagram and WhatsApp, haven’t created a must-have, standalone agent for work. Manus changes that instantly. It gives Meta a serious, paid enterprise-grade tool that actually does complex tasks—not just answers questions. This is Meta saying it won’t cede the future of productivity software to its rivals.
The big bet on integration
The biggest question now is how Meta integrates this. They say they’ll keep the Manus platform running and “integrate it with Meta’s broader social media ecosystem.” That’s vague, but think about the possibilities. Could Manus’s website-building agents be tied to Instagram shops? Could its research tools be offered to advertisers on the platform? The potential to weave a powerful AI agent into the fabric of business marketing on Facebook and Instagram is huge. But there’s always a risk. Big tech acquisitions often stifle the very innovation they paid for. Meta’s challenge is to provide the infrastructure and scale without bogging down Manus’s insane execution speed. If they can pull that off, this $2 billion might look like a bargain in a few years.
