From their Wikipedia, because I had no idea who they were:
"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."
Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.
There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.
This means all the new hires at 1 million dollar bonus, and AI specialists at Meta are not getting anywhere. And Manus its not even a model just a wrapper on Claude...Oh Zuck....
Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
This acquisition is a complete joke in China. From the very beginning, the company focused almost entirely on marketing. Then, after a few months, it fled China and relocated to Singapore. Now that it’s been acquired by Meta, you could say it has finally fulfilled its mission.
1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons
2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry
3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.
Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]
In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]
---
Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
Kind of feels like they might have done it on purpose, just to "trigger" people and get more engagement. Feels like a lot of people are falling for it too, so I guess good for them.
I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels. Honestly, nothing really impresses me enough to think, “Wow, this company actually deserves that kind of valuation”.
These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.
Because our markets are no longer efficient at allocating capital. These companies are too large, they don't compete. They can buy a company for half a billion and write it off a few months later, at the whim of someone deranged by hype. How many businesses in competitive markets can afford to do that?
I had tried manus and never could find a use-case for them that worked for me
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products
2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products
3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF
1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others
2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.
My guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf).
They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).
At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.
Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.
Is that input or output tokens or both? That number sounds quite extreme. Maybe they include input tokens from deep research? That could be tens of thousands of input tokens into a cheap model per task, for example.
I remember this company from the very beginning. I was very confused by them, but just the other day they sent an email saying they had hit $100MM ARR and $125MM run rate.
Had an identical reaction to that $100m email. I decided to try it again with the browser extension. My verdict is it is better than ChatGPT Atlas for the agent mode, so I see use cases for it.
But I am still surprised it's at $100mm ARR. I had thought the company had died after their initial hyped launch and didn't see anyone talking about or using the company at all since then...and we play around with a lot of AI tools. I wonder who their customers are.
Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
It says:
"Our top priority is ensuring that this change won't be disruptive for our customers. We will continue to sell and operate our product subscription service through our app and website. The company will continue to operate from Singapore."
But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.
Meta has shown a willingness to offer 9-digit pay packages to individual researchers. Even if they completely scrap the product, an acquihire of even a handful of Manus' top engineers/scientists here is totally in line with that kind of cash.
The evidence is pretty clear, and it keeps growing. Social media causes real harm, both to individuals and to society. It is addictive by design, it worsens mental health especially for kids, and it rewards outrage and misinformation. In that way, social media looks a lot like smoking. It was widely adopted before we understood the risks, then aggressively pushed because it was profitable.
Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.
That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
I'd like someone to do a comparison of tech company valuations pre GenAI vs post for the same vertical.
I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.
Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.
"I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to commoditized and the value would be in products on top of models, but MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all oxygen in the room."
I do think Manus had a better approach than some of the competitors of the space, allowing for far more agentic flows (ie manus would run its own code, debug, write and run tests, etc). Lovable or v0 by contrast are quite primitive. Very unfortunate that they are a part of meta now, where mark will likely micromanage and destroy the core value of the product.
Meta was lacking behind on the agents space. This is a good capture but they are making crazy good offers but not turning them into killer products so far. The AI agents space is picking up in 20206. Next they will hire voice agents like ElevenLabs and Cartesia, visual Agents like VLM Run or Landing AI and then web browsing agents.
I mean that gives us another ~18k years to adapt so we’ll be fine :)
I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.
Manus was pretty damn good at delivering impressive results well before other providers. I stopped using it because I was concerned about data privacy and and whatever extent one particular foreign country might (or might not) have hooks into Manus. Now that Meta has purchased them I know I'm safe ((sarcasm)).
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
It is nice that most people have a good grasp of Latin vocabulary and immediately recognize the word for “hand” because otherwise you’d probably get questions like “is the name of your product being eighty percent ‘anus’ intentional?” and so on
Sometimes I feel people are just jealous. If Meta is so ready to throw money why don't these people just build something and sell it to them for billions in 6 months. Join the winning side instead of complaining.
So I have a position that I don't think you'll like. I feel like making money is a means to a better life. Generally, we as a society should seek value creation that actually improves society and increases our productivity. If all you want to do is basically trick rich people out of their money, I don't think that is the world I want to live in.
Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.
I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next months. A similar recent example was Anthropic buying bun. Also undisclosed value.
Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.
The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.
Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.
It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
I think this might be a good acquisition for Meta; we are moving into the stage where backend models matter less and it is more about the users, the user interface, and the growth. A healthy sign.
Meta needed consumer product along with foundational model. Manus gives them consumer product now. Pure speculation - must be 5B+ acquisition given their revenue run rate.
This was one of the worst apps I've ever used around their launch. Logging in recently it looks like a generic chat now? I'm not sure what their product is.
Totally forgot Manus existed. It’s funny they’re so eager to tell us this acquisition means they are a pioneer. Imagine pioneering agentic LLM usage - surely you’d be buying Meta!
Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?
To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.
If I read one more article/press release/whatever with such clumsy use of antithesis, I’m going to go insane. I have no problem with using AI to write if it is done well, but this…
We are a sandbox provider company and we have a manus like agent deployed to "showcase" our capabilities. You can build one too -- maybe we will open-source it. For now, you can try it for free at https://showcase.instavm.io/
I don't get the negative sentiment wrt Manus. It was the best product in its area from the beginning, eclipsing anything US produced prior to it; only later US companies started catching up. I have a bitter taste in my mouth from Meta getting it and likely destroying it later as I used it with great outcomes for some recent research I did at Stanford.
kylecazar|2 months ago
"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."
Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.
dinniwang|2 months ago
nrhrjrjrjtntbt|2 months ago
belter|2 months ago
keyle|2 months ago
neilv|2 months ago
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
swyx|2 months ago
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
chenzhekl|2 months ago
android521|2 months ago
bigcat12345678|2 months ago
This statement is completely baseless
1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons
2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry
3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.
Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup
chvid|2 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
...
Company background
Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]
In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]
---
Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
RyanShook|2 months ago
Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.
imwally|2 months ago
varunramesh|2 months ago
embedding-shape|2 months ago
friggeri|2 months ago
equasar|2 months ago
These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.
mlsu|2 months ago
kshri24|2 months ago
Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.
Or the investors are just plain stupid.
cgio|2 months ago
filloooo|2 months ago
All these crazy valuations is just a manifestation.
mandeepj|2 months ago
That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)
xgulfie|2 months ago
throw-12-16|2 months ago
mercurialsolo|2 months ago
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products 2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products 3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF 1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others 2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
serf|2 months ago
kemyd|2 months ago
They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).
At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.
Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
poly2it|2 months ago
CamelCaseName|2 months ago
Who is paying? No clue, must be big in China.
I skipped going to their hackathon :')
rohanm93|2 months ago
But I am still surprised it's at $100mm ARR. I had thought the company had died after their initial hyped launch and didn't see anyone talking about or using the company at all since then...and we play around with a lot of AI tools. I wonder who their customers are.
shon|2 months ago
Hope Meta doesn't hose it.
arnley|2 months ago
That's one of the reasons I'm building out in the open:
- https://github.com/codename-co/devs - https://devs.new/
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
xdotli|2 months ago
But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.
Curious how much Meta paid them.
ketzo|2 months ago
joshuamerrill|2 months ago
Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.
That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
andyprevalsky|2 months ago
I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)
Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!
thierrydamiba|2 months ago
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
theusus|2 months ago
meander_water|2 months ago
I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.
Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.
CuriouslyC|2 months ago
Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.
Taikhoom10|2 months ago
2 billion is the price.
MangoCoffee|2 months ago
- Erik Meijer
https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20
I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.
qweiopqweiop|2 months ago
maddmann|2 months ago
visioninmyblood|2 months ago
apt-apt-apt-apt|2 months ago
Insanity|2 months ago
I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.
Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*
levocardia|2 months ago
kippinitreal|2 months ago
howmayiannoyyou|2 months ago
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
The acquisition is confusing to me.
tacker2000|2 months ago
alex1138|2 months ago
Do you even have to ask?
Yes
bigyabai|2 months ago
Is it, now?
jrflowers|2 months ago
rokhayakebe|2 months ago
noobermin|2 months ago
Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.
ukprogrammer|2 months ago
hate only comes from below!
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
andrewinardeer|2 months ago
jillesvangurp|2 months ago
Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.
The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.
Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.
It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
ipnon|2 months ago
chvid|2 months ago
dm8|2 months ago
It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
zkmon|2 months ago
These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.
js4ever|2 months ago
joshcsimmons|2 months ago
mrcwinn|2 months ago
d-yoda|2 months ago
hbarka|2 months ago
OrionNox|2 months ago
fibers|2 months ago
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nwhnwh|2 months ago
choudharism|2 months ago
ares623|2 months ago
mvdtnz|2 months ago
gregjw|2 months ago
syspec|2 months ago
Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?
I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.
---
You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.
It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.
sigmar|2 months ago
yanslookup|2 months ago
They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.
aratahikaru5|2 months ago
> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
> https://remotelabor.ai
Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106
If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.
unknown|2 months ago
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Anon1096|2 months ago
throw-12-16|2 months ago
kodefreeze|2 months ago
I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.
almaight|2 months ago
reactordev|2 months ago
maxall4|2 months ago
pyuser583|2 months ago
I hope the great product continues.
skeptrune|2 months ago
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