Meta Pays $2 Billion for Singapore AI Startup Manus

Meta is acquiring Singapore-based startup Manus to boost its artificial intelligence (AI) agent offerings.

“Manus is already serving the daily needs of millions of users and businesses worldwide,” Meta said in its announcement Monday (Dec. 29).

“It launched its first general AI agent earlier this year and has already served more than 147 trillion tokens and created more than 80 million virtual computers. We plan to scale this service to many more businesses.”

While the companies did not put a price tag on the deal, a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cites sources who said Meta is paying more than $2 billion. The sources also said Manus had been seeking new funding with a valuation of $2 billion.

The WSJ notes that the acquisition is one of the most high-profile cases of a U.S. tech giant purchasing an artificial intelligence (AI) product that came out of Asia’s AI/startup space.

Manus garnered a larger following, and the support of the Chinese government, in March after it showcased an AI agent that could produce detailed research reports and build custom websites, using AI models from companies such as Anthropic and China’s Alibaba.

The company has this year also rolled out a new subscription service and mobile app, as well as a text-to-video generative AI tool that transforms prompts into structured videos.

As for Meta, the WSJ characterizes the deal as a new direction for the company as it spends heavily on AI to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Meta earlier this month acquired Limitless, a maker of artificial intelligence-powered wearables, and invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI. The latter company’s founder, Alexandr Wang, also joined Meta as its new chief AI officer.

And while the company’s investors have reportedly grown impatient with Meta’s AI spending, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has this year engaged in an aggressive recruiting campaign, offering executives and researchers multi-million dollar compensation packages. The company would later halt its AI hiring blitz, and in October cut 600 roles in its AI unit.

With this latest deal, in which Meta will operate and sell Manus’ services and weave it into its social media platforms, the Facebook owner can better cement its position in the AI agent space, the WSJ report added.

As covered here earlier this month, Meta is in the midst of a strategic pivot in its AI approach, shifting away from open-source AI model development toward commercial, revenue-oriented AI offerings. That transition is reportedly centered on internal focus and investment in proprietary models, including an AI project codenamed Avocado, slated for release next spring and aimed at to compete with offerings from firms like OpenAI and Google.

“This change reflects Meta’s broader recalibration of how it captures value from its AI investments,” PYMNTS wrote. “Rather than emphasizing open-source research as a community good, Meta appears intent on building closed models that can be monetized directly, increasing revenue potential but also limiting external developer engagement.”