Meta has acquired Manus, a Chinese AI company, and plans to leverage the company's “sole agency” technology across its products.
Manus debuted in March 2025 and quickly touted itself as more than a generative AI chatbot, characterizing it as perfect for summarizing information and answering questions.
The organization touts its unique services as allowing “extensive research and context-aware reasoning to produce actionable results in the format you need.”
To illustrate that promise, Manus proposes a scenario in which a user asks their company's engineers to evaluate job applications stored in a .ZIP file and select the best candidates. Manus can open that archive, read the files it contains, evaluate them according to user-defined criteria, and create a document that ranks candidates by their suitability for the role.
The service runs it within its own “computer,” a VM hosted in the cloud, which Manas says “operates as a multi-agent system utilizing several different models.”
Manus was founded by a Chinese company called Butterfly Effect. The company also operates entities in Hong Kong and recently moved its headquarters to Singapore. The company recently claimed $100 million in annual recurring revenue after just eight months of launch.
“Manas already serves the daily needs of millions of users and businesses around the world,” Meta's deal announcement said, adding that its Chinese-made staff will join the social networking giant. The transaction amount was not disclosed.
Manas praised the acquisition, saying it “demonstrates our pioneering work with general purpose AI agents.”
“Our solutions are currently delivering value to millions of users around the world. Over time, we hope to extend this subscription to the millions of businesses and billions of people who rely on Meta's platform,” Manas' post said, adding a platitude from CEO Xiao Hong, who said joining Zuccosphere was an opportunity to “build a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing the way Manas works and makes decisions.”
“We're excited about what the future holds for Meta and Manus together. We look forward to continuing to iterate on the product and serve the users who defined Manus in the first place.”
Lifetime metaboss Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a “superintelligence” service, which he defines as software that “gets to know us, understands our goals, and helps us achieve them.”
In pursuit of that goal, Meta has committed to at least $70 billion in capital investment in 2025, with more to come next year, much of it going toward building data centers to host AI workloads. Although the company credits AI with helping boost advertising revenue, Meta does not currently offer paid AI services, but is reportedly testing a subscription product called Meta AI+.
Manus seems well suited for that service, and perhaps even a step toward superintelligence.
This transaction is Meta's fifth AI-related acquisition in 2025, following the acquisitions of AI startups PlayAI and WaveForms, accelerator developer Rivos, and wearable device developer Limitless. The social networking giant is also dangling eight-figure compensation packages to attract top AI talent to the company. ®
