The viral general-purpose AI agent that works on its own — acquired by Meta for $2B+
HQ: Singapore (Chinese-founded; Butterfly Effect) | Founded: 2024 | Employees: ~100 (2025, est.) | Stage: Acquired by Meta (December 2025) | Website: https://manus.im
Manus emerged from Butterfly Effect, the Chinese-founded company behind the Monica (Monica.im) AI assistant, founded by Ji Yihao (Joey Ji). The team had spent years building consumer AI products; Manus — Latin for 'hand' — was the culmination: an autonomous agent that doesn't just chat but acts, executing multi-step tasks end-to-end across web browsing, computer use, coding, and data analysis.\n\nManus launched on March 6, 2025, and instantly went viral. Invite codes became a scarcity commodity on Chinese social media, and the product earned comparisons to DeepSeek as another 'China moment' in AI. By April 2025 it had raised a $75M Series B led by Benchmark at a $500M post-money valuation — a remarkable trajectory for a product barely a month old — and growth compounded: 20%+ month-over-month, $100M ARR within eight months of launch, and a $125M revenue run-rate by December 2025.\n\nThe standalone story ended dramatically on December 29-30, 2025, when Meta agreed to acquire Manus for more than $2 billion. Meta framed the deal as bringing 'exceptional talent' and 'millions of paying users' into the company to build general-purpose agents across its consumer and business products, including Meta AI. For a company that went from launch to a $2B+ exit in under ten months, Manus stands as one of the fastest value-creation stories in AI history — and the clearest validation yet of the autonomous-agent category.
Manus showed the world what a genuinely autonomous general-purpose agent looks like: launch a task, walk away, and come back to a finished job — research, spreadsheets, code, and all. It went viral on launch day in March 2025 (the 'second DeepSeek moment'), hit $100M ARR within eight months, and capped its standalone run with a $75M Benchmark-led Series B at $500M and then a more-than-$2B acquisition by Meta in December 2025. For Meta, Manus was a talent-and-product acqui-hire at scale — a team that had cracked agent UX and a product with millions of paying users, destined to become the agentic core of Meta AI. The lasting lesson is less about Manus the company (it's now inside Meta) than about the agent category it validated: autonomous, general-purpose agents became the hottest product category in AI, with Manus as the proof point.
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