Social media giant Meta plans to buy artificial intelligence (AI) startup Manus, a Chinese-founded firm now based in Singapore, as it steps up efforts to embed more advanced AI in its consumer and business services.
According to a Reuters report on December 30, Meta announced on Monday that it had agreed to acquire Manus without disclosing financial terms of the deal. However, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said the transaction values the Singapore-based company at between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Meta plans to continue offering Manus’s services and fold the technology into its AI features for both consumers and corporate clients, including its Meta AI assistant.
Barton Crockett, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, said the planned acquisition fits with Meta’s expanding use of WhatsApp by small and medium-sized businesses and with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to build more capable personal AI agents.
The Chinese-founded startup drew wide attention earlier this year after promoting what it described as a general AI agent able to make decisions and carry out tasks with far less prompting than popular chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. The launch went viral on X, prompted some commentators to label Manus as China’s next DeepSeek and attracted praise from Chinese state television.
Why Meta Chose Manus
Manus has built its reputation around a general artificial intelligence agent that can plan and execute complex tasks on its own, rather than waiting for step-by-step prompts like a traditional chatbot. The company says this agent can browse the web, write and debug code, analyze data, and assemble presentations with minimal human input and has marketed it as the first general AI agent of its kind.
The startup has also shown it can operate at scale and form alliances with major platforms. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with Alibaba’s Qwen team to combine its agent with Alibaba models and computing infrastructure, a deal that underlined its engineering depth and appeal to big cloud providers.
Furthermore, investors such as United States venture firm Benchmark and Chinese technology group Tencent backed the company in a funding round that valued it at about $500 million before Meta’s offer, giving it credibility in both Western and Chinese capital markets.
For Meta, Manus offers a ready-made agent platform with proven traction among businesses at a time when Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is trying to shift from simple chat assistants toward personal and workplace agents that can act on behalf of users.
AI Startups Draw Growing Investor Attention
The planned Manus purchase underscores how large technology groups are competing to secure promising artificial intelligence firms.
Last week, Groq announced that Nvidia is preparing for its largest deal to date, agreeing to pay about $20 billion in cash for Groq assets, including rights to its AI inference technology.
Under a non-exclusive licensing agreement, Nvidia will gain use of Groq inference technology, while founder and chief executive Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, and other senior leaders move to Nvidia to help develop and scale the platform. Groq said it will remain an independent company, with finance chief Simon Edwards becoming chief executive.
Groq, based in Mountain View, California, develops artificial intelligence chips that accelerate the inference stage when trained models generate answers. Its main product, the Language Processing Unit, is designed to deliver low latency and high throughput on large language models and other AI workloads, offered to customers through its GroqCloud service.
This growing number of deals highlights how large technology companies are turning to specialized AI startups to secure new capabilities and shorten development timelines. Rather than building every tool internally, firms such as Meta and Nvidia are paying up for proven platforms and teams that can be plugged directly into their existing products.
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