ManusAI Joins Meta

https://manus.im/blog/manus-joins-meta-for-next-era-of-innovation

by gniting • 7 months ago

319 205 7 months ago

It's everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_ju...

Kind of feels like they might have done it on purpose, just to "trigger" people and get more engagement. Feels like a lot of people are falling for it too, so I guess good for them.

andy99• 7 months ago

It’s been very effective watermarking compared to some of the more complicated and seemingly unsuccessful methods that have been proposed.

friggeri• 7 months ago

non tantum … sed etiam …

bigyabai• 7 months ago

This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.

Is it, now?

fibers• 7 months ago

Why Meta and not OAI/Anthropic or Google? Is this their attempt after llama4?

reactordev• 7 months ago

If you can’t beat em. Buy someone who can.

syspec• 7 months ago

This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.

Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?

I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.

---

You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.

It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.

yanslookup2• 7 months ago

I don't get it.

They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.

sokka_h2otribe• 7 months ago

Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM

sigmar• 7 months ago

Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?

Anon1096• 7 months ago

To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.

bwfan123• 7 months ago

I saw this in a past hype cycle. What happens is that it becomes a "performative" art in an echo-chamber for startups, startup founders, VCs. Performative meaning doing things one thinks others want to see rather than when it makes sense.

Management is quizzing their tech teams on injecting agents into their workflows whatever the f that means. Some of these big companies will acquire startups in the space so they are not left behind on the hype-train. So, they can claim to have agentic talent on their teams.

Those of us who have seen this movie play out know the ending.

aratahikaru5• 7 months ago

Some context:

Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
https://remotelabor.ai

Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106

If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.

joshuamerrill3• 7 months ago

The evidence is pretty clear, and it keeps growing. Social media causes real harm, both to individuals and to society. It is addictive by design, it worsens mental health especially for kids, and it rewards outrage and misinformation. In that way, social media looks a lot like smoking. It was widely adopted before we understood the risks, then aggressively pushed because it was profitable.

Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.

That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.

thierrydamiba• 7 months ago

What’s the difference between social media and books?

Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?

joshuamerrill3• 7 months ago

Taking your questions at face value, the difference is incentives and feedback loops.

Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.

Alex2037• 7 months ago

things I like are good. things I don't like are bad.

byearthithatius• 7 months ago

Anybody who has meaningfully engaged with short-form dynamically adapted video content and read a book can EASILY tell the difference. It is Morphine vs Fentanyl

dwa3592• 7 months ago

Books aren't harassing kids!

jjulius2• 7 months ago

What’s the difference between social media and books?

I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.

viccis• 7 months ago

Books are a medium that encourages literacy and helps understand others. Social media, in its current iteration, discourages curiosity and heightens conflict with others.

andyprevalsky• 7 months ago

That’s why I’m building https://roselabs.ai!

I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)

Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!

kylecazar• 7 months ago

From their Wikipedia, because I had no idea who they were:

"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."

Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.

keyle• 7 months ago

Yep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.

echelon2• 7 months ago

Meta prints money. This is pocket change for them.

Perhaps just seeing what advanced LLM users are up to is worth the cost. They get a direct peek with this acquisition.

belter• 7 months ago

This means all the new hires at 1 million dollar bonus, and AI specialists at Meta are not getting anywhere. And Manus its not even a model just a wrapper on Claude...Oh Zuck....

dinniwang• 7 months ago

There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.

germinalphrase2• 7 months ago

Go on.

echelon2• 7 months ago

You should elaborate on this more.

sa-code• 7 months ago

Please continue

ares6233• 7 months ago

It really does seem like friends giving friends a piece of the pie before it all blows up.

sixtyj• 7 months ago

Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.

And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.

Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.

But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.

bko3• 7 months ago

Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

elAhmo• 7 months ago

Could you elaborate on this?

w11233kf• 7 months ago

The data labeler has been instructed to build products, so he splurges on a company, which, unlike 95% of AI startups, at least has a functioning website.

He is also hiring in Singapore:

https://www.ft.com/content/1bf28a2f-4778-4a83-8276-eaa19d888...

I have never heard of manus.ai before. I hope he checked if the revenue is circular. It does feel like friend/FOMO acquisitions in 1999.

swyx• 7 months ago

have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.

i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8

(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 7 months ago

Aquisitions so fast it is income not capital gains.

dragonwriter• 7 months ago

Capital gains are a form of income, and have nothing to do with speed (long-term capital gains are distinguished from short-term capital gains by speed, but...)

neilv3• 7 months ago

Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.

In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:

* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or

* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.

torben-friis• 7 months ago

Bubble aside, it feels AI is by nature a less democratic tech.

The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.

bostik2• 7 months ago

You've stumbled upon the same trade Matt Levine has been pointing out for a few months now.

If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet.

Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 years.

In less surprising news, Matt has pointed out a number of deals that look quite a bit like that throughout 2025.

llmslave2• 7 months ago

Who?

barishnamazov• 7 months ago

username doesn't check out

howmayiannoyyou• 7 months ago

Manus was pretty damn good at delivering impressive results well before other providers. I stopped using it because I was concerned about data privacy and and whatever extent one particular foreign country might (or might not) have hooks into Manus. Now that Meta has purchased them I know I'm safe ((sarcasm)).

I have many questions:

- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?

- Did they grossly overpay?

- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?

- Will Manus' top talent bail?

- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?

- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?

The acquisition is confusing to me.

tacker2000• 7 months ago

What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?

alex1138• 7 months ago

Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions?

Do you even have to ask?

Yes

andrewinardeer• 7 months ago

Nothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?

jillesvangurp• 7 months ago

I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next months. A similar recent example was Anthropic buying bun. Also undisclosed value.

Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.

The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.

Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.

It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.

ipnon• 7 months ago

$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.

alvis• 7 months ago

A random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it

nwhnwh• 7 months ago

https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23

choudharism• 7 months ago

What metaverse?

shon2• 7 months ago

Bummer. Manus was the best actual agent for my money. I literally have it working for me right now so I can goof off on HN… no joke.

bjourne• 7 months ago

What is your agent doing?

mayop100• 7 months ago

If you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)

garbawarb• 7 months ago

What is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?

mkagenius• 7 months ago

We are a sandbox provider company and we have a manus like agent deployed to "showcase" our capabilities. You can build one too -- maybe we will open-source it. For now, you can try it for free at https://showcase.instavm.io/

visioninmyblood• 7 months ago

Meta was lacking behind on the agents space. This is a good capture but they are making crazy good offers but not turning them into killer products so far. The AI agents space is picking up in 20206. Next they will hire voice agents like ElevenLabs and Cartesia, visual Agents like VLM Run or Landing AI and then web browsing agents.

Insanity• 7 months ago

I mean that gives us another ~18k years to adapt so we’ll be fine :)

I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.

Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*

apt-apt-apt-apt• 7 months ago

Lagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.

levocardia• 7 months ago

If you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!

mrcwinn• 7 months ago

Totally forgot Manus existed. It’s funny they’re so eager to tell us this acquisition means they are a pioneer. Imagine pioneering agentic LLM usage - surely you’d be buying Meta!

skeptrune• 7 months ago

weird timing given they just announced new revenue

dm8• 7 months ago

Meta needed consumer product along with foundational model. Manus gives them consumer product now. Pure speculation - must be 5B+ acquisition given their revenue run rate.

It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.

CuriouslyC• 7 months ago

Meta spending billions on a company developing a product that will be totally commoditized.

Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.

mercurialsolo• 7 months ago

I had tried manus and never could find a use-case for them that worked for me

1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products 2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products 3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.

TBF 1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others 2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.

But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one

serf• 7 months ago

It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.

psadri• 7 months ago

They launched March 2025. It’s great that’s considered a long time ago.

equasar• 7 months ago

I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels. Honestly, nothing really impresses me enough to think, “Wow, this company actually deserves that kind of valuation”.

These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.

xgulfie• 7 months ago

It's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever

cgio• 7 months ago

I hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.

nativeit• 7 months ago

What's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?

afavour• 7 months ago

Survivorship bias, I think. Our go to is the big, high profile success. But look at the amount of money Zuck has wasted on the Metaverse. He’s most definitely fallible.

mlsu• 7 months ago

Because our markets are no longer efficient at allocating capital. These companies are too large, they don't compete. They can buy a company for half a billion and write it off a few months later, at the whim of someone deranged by hype. How many businesses in competitive markets can afford to do that?

pishpash• 7 months ago

And the reason is all of you dumping cash into the market no matter what because John Bogle said so half a century ago.

mandeepj• 7 months ago

I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels.

That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)

kshri24• 7 months ago

this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art

Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.

Or the investors are just plain stupid.

throw-12-164• 7 months ago

The crypto bros switched over to AI.

filloooo2• 7 months ago

Because we are at a historic moment where governments are propping up fiat money using whatever they could.

All these crazy valuations is just a manifestation.

xdotli• 7 months ago

It says: "Our top priority is ensuring that this change won't be disruptive for our customers. We will continue to sell and operate our product subscription service through our app and website. The company will continue to operate from Singapore."

But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.

Curious how much Meta paid them.

ketzo• 7 months ago

Meta has shown a willingness to offer 9-digit pay packages to individual researchers. Even if they completely scrap the product, an acquihire of even a handful of Manus' top engineers/scientists here is totally in line with that kind of cash.

chenzhekl• 7 months ago

This acquisition is a complete joke in China. From the very beginning, the company focused almost entirely on marketing. Then, after a few months, it fled China and relocated to Singapore. Now that it’s been acquired by Meta, you could say it has finally fulfilled its mission.

RyanShook• 7 months ago

Definitely feels like a Claude wrapped with a lot of marketing. But you’d think there must be something more if Meta acquired them…

Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.

kodefreeze2• 7 months ago

They have browser automation, and a bunch of other agent tools to manage tasks, do things like PowerPoint slides, etc. I find chatgpt agent mode better for most tasks though.

csomar• 7 months ago

I mean given they went on a crazy AI hiring spree and then desmantling the whole thing just a few weeks later... I'll actually need prove that there is anything in there.

d0100• 7 months ago

Manus is pretty "big" in the entrepreneur crowd here in Brazil

When it came out is was very good, and had much better results than ChatGPT

android521• 7 months ago

Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils

fhe• 7 months ago

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

ares6233• 7 months ago

It’s because the Meta brand is poison.

stingraycharles• 7 months ago

How does due diligence work for these type of acquisitions, do they even have one? What do they think they’re buying? A team? Technology? A brand?

imwally• 7 months ago

I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.

uberdru• 7 months ago

I had to look. This tickled the copywriter in me: "Mission: To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life." so you can leverage your life? never thought of that.

bigcat123456786• 7 months ago

I am Chinese and AI founder since 2023

This statement is completely baseless

1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons

2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry

3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator

I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.

Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup

TigerHix• 7 months ago

I am also Chinese and AI founder.

they always have great reputation in the AI industry

Highly doubt this.

the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator

How is this remotely technically impressive? LLM chat apps have been commoditized for years already.

Even within the Chinese tech/AI community, Manus has often been frowned upon. People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point. Most of the positive coverage around Manus came from WeChat PR articles, which I'm sure you know how those Gongzhonghao work.

I agree that the West often stereotypes Chinese startups in unfair ways. But the Manus story is about as stereotypical as it gets.

danieltanfh952• 7 months ago

Please. Manus had a live demo in Google Expo 2025 in Singapore and they blew it. It was such bad taste.

Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.

tensor• 7 months ago

It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.

I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.

oefrha3• 7 months ago

Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.

Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.

zingar4• 7 months ago

they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct

I’m not seeing accusations of morally inferior conduct here. Tech people like to dunk on marketing people no matter where in the world they are.

chvid2• 7 months ago

From wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

...

Company background

Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]

In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]

---

Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".

meander_water• 7 months ago

I'd like someone to do a comparison of tech company valuations pre GenAI vs post for the same vertical.

I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.

Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.

m3kw9• 7 months ago

i thought mAnus was a joke app

ares6233• 7 months ago

Did the founders have a nice leisurely walk in the park with Mark

yanhangyhy• 7 months ago

sounds like another joke on Meta..

satoru42• 7 months ago

The last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.

shon2• 7 months ago

Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.

Hope Meta doesn't hose it.

arnley• 7 months ago

Greatest products with such an impact on people should not be behind closed doors. And delegating complex tasks to AI is clearly what's next.

That's one of the reasons I'm building out in the open:

- https://github.com/codename-co/devs - https://devs.new/

It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.

Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.

Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.

OrionNox• 7 months ago

Oh I remember them, I completely forgot Abt them since they went briefly viral on x

kodefreeze2• 7 months ago

Interesting that Meta is acquiring a Chinese company.

I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.

almaight• 7 months ago

No, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.

gregjw• 7 months ago

Literally days ago they were flexing on here. Hilarious.

pyuser583• 7 months ago

I’m an early use of Manus. I’m very impressed with it. That’s all I can say.

I hope the great product continues.

storus• 7 months ago

I don't get the negative sentiment wrt Manus. It was the best product in its area from the beginning, eclipsing anything US produced prior to it; only later US companies started catching up. I have a bitter taste in my mouth from Meta getting it and likely destroying it later as I used it with great outcomes for some recent research I did at Stanford.

chvid2• 7 months ago

I think this might be a good acquisition for Meta; we are moving into the stage where backend models matter less and it is more about the users, the user interface, and the growth. A healthy sign.

d-yoda• 7 months ago

So what happens when they swap Claude for Llama under the hood?

zkmon• 7 months ago

our agent has processed more than 147 Trillion tokens and powered the creation of over 80 Million virtual computers

These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.

CamelCaseName• 7 months ago

I remember this company from the very beginning. I was very confused by them, but just the other day they sent an email saying they had hit $100MM ARR and $125MM run rate.

Who is paying? No clue, must be big in China.

I skipped going to their hackathon :')

rohanm93• 7 months ago

Had an identical reaction to that $100m email. I decided to try it again with the browser extension. My verdict is it is better than ChatGPT Atlas for the agent mode, so I see use cases for it.

But I am still surprised it's at $100mm ARR. I had thought the company had died after their initial hyped launch and didn't see anyone talking about or using the company at all since then...and we play around with a lot of AI tools. I wonder who their customers are.

filloooo2• 7 months ago

I think FUD is working on Meta coming from their archrival Bytedance.

Bytedance recently launched a similar product in China and caused quite a stir, local phone brands are jostling for partnerships, the AI agent phone.

Meta probably don't want to miss the next thing, even if it turned out to be a dud.

theusus• 7 months ago

I used trial of Manus and it was in no way better than GPT. And they are using publicly available models only.

maxall4• 7 months ago

If I read one more article/press release/whatever with such clumsy use of antithesis, I’m going to go insane. I have no problem with using AI to write if it is done well, but this…

vga42• 7 months ago

I'm always baffled by the language used for acquisitions. More correct would be, "ManusAI gets bought off by Meta".

MagicMoonlight• 7 months ago

Why do people buy these slop companies? An API wrapper isn’t some new technology. You get nothing from it.

benterix• 7 months ago

It has nothing to do with logic, rather this person knows that person etc.

shevy-java• 7 months ago

I don't like it.

rokhayakebe2• 7 months ago

Sometimes I feel people are just jealous. If Meta is so ready to throw money why don't these people just build something and sell it to them for billions in 6 months. Join the winning side instead of complaining.

noobermin2• 7 months ago

So I have a position that I don't think you'll like. I feel like making money is a means to a better life. Generally, we as a society should seek value creation that actually improves society and increases our productivity. If all you want to do is basically trick rich people out of their money, I don't think that is the world I want to live in.

Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.

StrangeSound• 7 months ago

Where's the trick here?

rokhayakebe2• 7 months ago

Do people really think Mark is simple? At his level a billion is not what you and I think it is. To most it's money to him it's just accounting with no negative financial impact whatsoever.

ukprogrammer• 7 months ago

it's just jealously.

hate only comes from below!

throw-12-164• 7 months ago

So I guess the crypto exodus to AI is paying off.

jrflowers• 7 months ago

It is nice that most people have a good grasp of Latin vocabulary and immediately recognize the word for “hand” because otherwise you’d probably get questions like “is the name of your product being eighty percent ‘anus’ intentional?” and so on

MangoCoffee• 7 months ago

"I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to commoditized and the value would be in products on top of models, but MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all oxygen in the room."

- Erik Meijer

https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20

I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.

qweiopqweiop• 7 months ago

You missed the ending - "As always, I was right.". Anyone saying this needs to take a long look at themselves.

kippinitreal• 7 months ago

Wrote up some thoughts on what their financials may look like. Quick take is that they probably need cash fast! https://kippinitreal.substack.com/p/manus-acquisition-though...

kemyd• 7 months ago

My guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf).

They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).

At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.

Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.

poly2it• 7 months ago

Is that input or output tokens or both? That number sounds quite extreme. Maybe they include input tokens from deep research? That could be tens of thousands of input tokens into a cheap model per task, for example.

maddmann• 7 months ago

I do think Manus had a better approach than some of the competitors of the space, allowing for far more agentic flows (ie manus would run its own code, debug, write and run tests, etc). Lovable or v0 by contrast are quite primitive. Very unfortunate that they are a part of meta now, where mark will likely micromanage and destroy the core value of the product.

js4ever• 7 months ago

We are launching a similar tool (but more human) and made in EU. If you are curious: https://Geta.Team

mvdtnz• 7 months ago

No way they called a company "Manus". No way.

Taikhoom10• 7 months ago

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-buys-ai-startup-manus-addin...

2 billion is the price.

joshcsimmons• 7 months ago

This was one of the worst apps I've ever used around their launch. Logging in recently it looks like a generic chat now? I'm not sure what their product is.

hbarka• 7 months ago

NateBJones on Manus: https://youtu.be/DAxARHKQAXs

ManusAI Joins Meta

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