Meta's $2 Billion Acquisition
Manus AI was publicly released in March 2025.
By the end of the year, it had already reached a multi-billion-dollar acquisition.
Most tools that we interact with these days are chatbots. They are conversational: we ask a question, and they generate information for us, hence the name “generative AI.” Even when those replies are useful, the AI’s role usually ends there. We still decide what to do next and complete those tasks ourselves.
This is where Manus AI differentiates itself. Manus AI is a Singapore-based startup, and instead of focusing on generating responses, it focuses on carrying out goals. We give it an objective, and it attempts to move that objective toward completion on its own. That means deciding what steps are needed, using available tools, and continuing to act until the task is done, which is why it is a prime example of agentic AI.
A simple way to think about Manus AI is through a small, everyday task. Say we want to email a professor with a question about a lecture. With most AI tools, we might ask for help drafting the message, but we still have to open our email, paste the text, and send it ourselves. Manus approaches this differently. We start by stating the task, emailing a professor a question about a specific lecture, and assuming it has access to the relevant notes and our email, it tries to carry the task through to completion. Writing the message is just one step in that process. The point is not the email itself, but the shift in how responsibility is handled. Instead of stopping after generating text, the system is designed to keep moving until the task is done.
It’s also worth noting how quickly the company itself has scaled. According to figures shared on their website, Manus AI crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue roughly eight months after launch, which explains why a product this new could attract attention so quickly.
This shows that AI tools are moving from helping us think to helping us complete tasks, and Manus AI is one of the clearest examples of this shift so far. So, the speed of Meta's acquisition makes sense, and I think Manus AI sets the road for how AI systems are going to move forward.
The important thing here isn't the valuation, but how fast it happened. For a product this young to be acquired at this scale, it's tapped into something the industry already cares deeply about.