Meta Just Bought Manus, an AI Startup Everyone Has Been Talking About 34
Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the 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 an earlier $10 million round.
Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was 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 (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.
Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was 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 (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Wow (Score:2)
Where's Greenspan, raising rates? If he hadn't had technophobia would there even have been a dotcom crash?
Re: (Score:2)
Technophobia is the most reasonable default reaction to most of tech. Most of the tech industry are hucksters trying to convince you to buy something you do not understand nor need. Being wary of guys obviously running scams is just common sense.
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The 2008 caused more damage to more people because something like 200 million Americans own homes. Because the average consumer was exposed to the housing market, a crash in that sector greatly impacted the average consumer. The 20
Meta can't make stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
It's long past time to accept that Meta is being mismanaged.
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All big companies are shopping around. And some are also buying every competition before it gets big.
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Large companies think they can buy progress by importing labor from a 3rd world country with universities stuck in the 70s. I was just laid off from a formerly brilliaint company. They made the mistake of hiring a python monkey and that python monkey brought all of his friends. Innovation evaporated but meeting frequency and durations increased. Finally this company started to buy products because their resident workforce evolved the talent out the door.
Really? (Score:2)
I've never heard anybody talking about this anus.
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Apparently it is all about shoveling it downstream to the "AI investor" community.
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But, hey... they just made 2 billion dollars just by making a cool tech demo video.
This is a prime example on how you make mad bank in the middle of a tech bubble. I hope that the developers reading this are taking notes!
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MAN-us. As in - man's anus.
(I've never heard of them either)
Hands of fate (Score:4, Interesting)
A company named after a film considered one of the worst ever made? I hadn't heard of them before today, so evidently not everyone is talking about them.
Everyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Who TF are Manus?
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^ This
"Everyone", it does not mean what you think.... (Score:4, Insightful)
In particular here, what you should have written is "almost nobody"....
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Widely known in narrow circles, as we used to say under the Communist yoke.
Artificial Idiot (Score:3)
Re: Artificial Idiot (Score:1)
Do you have a truer understanding of English syntax? Do you generate more mistakes?
Never Never Never (Score:4, Insightful)
Never heard ANYONE mention it.
Never heard of it.
Never going to give it another thought.
Re: (Score:3)
You forgot to reword it to match Rick's song.
And now it's stuck in my mind..
Pets.com (Score:2)
I've faked my share of tech demos (Score:2)
It's a time of contrast (Score:2)
Deep Mind is working on powerful tools to help scientists
Meta is working on developing fake friends that sell people stuff they don't want
Company nobody has heard of (Score:2)
Acquired for way more than it's worth.
We're rapidly heading towards the dotcom era's infamous go to bed a millionaire, wake up a billionaire, being bankrupt for lunch.
opensourced...not so fast (Score:2)
No antitrust issues here (Score:2)
One of the world's biggest companies buying a small company whose product directly competes with their own. Nothing anticompetitive here. Just good capitalism wisely eliminating a competitor before it can get big enough to be a threat. Which is totally different!
Oh, great! (Score:2)
Oh, great! More hot garbage to clutter up the WhatsApp UI. Anyone wanna take bets whether there will be a setting to disable these new "agents"?
I complained to the Meta AI about being unable to disable Meta AI in such vile language that Meta AI banned me from conversing with Meta AI. Unfortunately, the useless button is still there, getting in the way, regardless.