Mark Zuckerberg has struck again.

Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that’s become the talk of Silicon Valley since it debuted last spring with a demo video that showed an AI agent doing things like screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.

In April, just weeks after launch, venture capital firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million, and saw Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta joining the startup’s board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via a $10 million round.

The company recently announced it has since signed up millions of users for and was generating annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million from monthly and year subscribers to its membership service.

That’s when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says the tech giant is paying $2 billion — the valuation Manus was reportedly seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that’s actually making money. This is especially pertinent given that investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta’s $60 billion infrastructure spending spree, and the broader tech industry’s debt-backed expenditures on data center construction.

Meta says it’ll keep Manus running independently, and weave the startup’s AI agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

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