An exciting year ahead? Meta has announced the acquisition of Manus, a firm developing general AI agents. Sources say the deal could be worth around $2.5B. (Yes, you read that right!)

The startup isn’t even a year old.

• The SEA connection. Manus was launched in March 2025 by Chinese AI studio Butterfly Effect, but later moved its headquarters to Singapore.

Uh oh. The AI company’s ties to China were previously questioned by a US official. A Meta spokesperson said the deal would fully sever Manus’s remaining ties to China.   

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🔢 What Manus can do

Manus deployed general-purpose AI agents that can carry out multi-step tasks. Their agents can autonomously conduct market research, generate content, write code, analyze data, and more!

• Manus positions itself as an execution layer, not just another AI assistant. 
• Their agents are designed to execute tasks from start to finish, planning and iterating on intermediate outputs to prioritize delivering finished projects over one-off tasks. 

The numbers, so far. In a statement, Manus said that its agent has already processed more than 147T tokens and powered over 80M virtual computers.

Why Meta bought Manus. Meta said the deal is part of its plans to scale general-purpose AI agents across its products.  

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🔥 Some more detail

Manus will maintain their operations in Singapore and continue serving their users through its app and website. 

• The Manus team will join Meta to help deliver general-purpose agents across Meta’s product suite. 
• In turn, Meta plans to scale the service to reach more businesses.