Manus, an agentic AI platform developed by Singapore-based startup Butterfly Effect Technology, is now part of Meta.
In a brief announcement, Meta said that Manus’s team will join the company to help develop general-purpose AI agents across Meta’s products.
Neither Meta nor Manus (owned by Butterfly Effect Technologies) disclosed financial terms, and it remains unclear whether the deal is a 100% acquisition or an acquihire. However, several media reports stated that Meta has acquired the company.
In its official blogpost, Manus said its products will continue operating without disruption. “Our top priority is ensuring that this change won’t be disruptive for our customers,” the company said in a statement.
Liu Yuan, a partner at ZhenFund and an angel investor in Butterfly Effect, told the Chinese media outlet 36kr that the negotiation process was so “incredibly fast” that he doubted whether this was a fake offer.
The report added that the ‘acquisition negotiations’ were completed in little over ten days. Manus was previously in the process of raising fresh funding at a $2 billion valuation, but the “vision offered by Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly swayed” the team.
Manus is positioned as a general-purpose AI agent designed to execute work rather than simply generate responses. It can independently research topics by pulling from multiple online sources, navigate websites to complete tasks end-to-end, and analyse structured data from Excel and CSV files.
It also supports image generation, visual assets, and other structured outputs within larger workflows and integrates with tools, including Google Chrome, Drive, Gmail, Notion, and Google Calendar.
On benchmarks such as Meta’s Remote Labour Index, which measures automation of remote work, Manus ranked first, outperforming xAI’s Grok 4, GPT-5, ChatGPT Agent, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, although the benchmark has not been updated to reflect newer model releases.
Earlier this year, Manus announced it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch, placing it among the fastest-growing AI startups alongside Lovable, Replit, and Cursor.
The company offers paid plans ranging from $20 to $200 per month.
The deal follows a significant restructuring of Manus’s corporate footprint.
The company was founded in 2022 by a China-based team and raised $75 million in a Series B round just weeks after launch in a round led by US venture firm Benchmark, at an estimated $500 million valuation. The funding drew scrutiny from US regulators because of executive orders restricting American capital from flowing into Chinese AI companies, prompting a Treasury Department review.
Following the round, Manus relocated its headquarters to Singapore and sharply reduced its presence in China. This included layoffs in mainland China, shutting down China operations, abandoning plans for a localised Chinese release, and cutting off technical collaboration frameworks previously discussed with Alibaba.
Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X, “Neither the US government nor the Chinese government would have permitted Meta to acquire Manus if it had remained based in Beijing.”
“But once Manus fled China, likely as a result of US outbound investment restrictions, the Chinese government lost its influence over Manus and its say in the transaction,” he added.
The acquisition comes as Meta struggles to keep pace in the open-source model race. Llama 4 has underperformed expectations, while Chinese models such as Kimi, Qwen, and DeepSeek have advanced rapidly.
Like Meta’s earlier Scale AI deal and the formation of its new ‘Superintelligence’ team, the Manus acquisition appears aimed at building a new agentic layer within its offerings.
One developer stated on X that this deal signals how Meta will now focus on the execution layer of AI workloads.
Meta’s hardware products, including Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest headsets, could act as agent interfaces, while apps like WhatsApp and Instagram become task-delegation layers.
WhatsApp already supports payments, business commerce, Meta AI content generation, and scheduling, positioning it as a natural surface for deploying AI agents at scale.
Rishi Dean, VP of tech at Lyft, wrote on X: “So many US companies don’t understand how much better ManusAI is at everything they’re trying to build.”
“This is an acquisition like YouTube or WhatsApp,” he added.
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