Babe wake up… Zuck just bought another AI startup…

As if Meta hadn’t already won the Guinness World Record for “most AI shopping sprees in a single calendar year,” Meta decided to sneak in one last deal before New Year’s.

According to reports, Zuck is writing a check to Manus… a fast-growing AI agent shop with Chinese roots, a Singapore passport, and real revenue to back it up. Deal terms? Officially undisclosed. Unofficially? The Wall Street Journal says north of $2B. Because of course it is.

For context, Manus launched its first general-purpose AI agent earlier this year and somehow sprinted to a $125M+ revenue run rate in about eight months. The agents themselves do the kind of white-collar grunt work everyone pretends they enjoy (market research, coding, data analysis, resume screening) all wrapped in subscription software that businesses already pay for.

(Source: Bloomberg)

And here’s the part that makes this deal extra Meta-coded: Manus will keep operating its subscription service as-is. Translation: Zuck didn’t buy another money-pit toy… he bought a working machine, and all he has to do now is not f*** it up.

This all fits into Meta’s entire strategy of hoarding AI talent like it’s beachfront property in 1997. Like when they wired $14.3B into Scale AI, walked off with CEO Alexandr Wang and stapled him straight into the AI leadership org. Not long after, Zuck also wrote a check for AI wearables startup Limitless, because apparently regular glasses weren’t invasive enough.

Now comes Manus, with its engineers, models, and battle-tested infrastructure getting vacuumed directly into the Meta AI ecosystem right alongside Llama. Which means no long R&D cycles and no waiting around for internal teams to catch up. Just buy the future, bolt it on, and keep moving.

This isn’t about one chatbot beating another chatbot. It’s about building an army of agents that quietly automate everything behind the scenes while everyone else argues about prompts.

Manus started life under a Chinese startup umbrella (Butterfly Effect / Monica.im), later moved HQ to Singapore, and still maintains ties across Asia… including a partnership with Alibaba’s Qwen AI team and backing from Tencent. 

It also laid off most of its Beijing staff last summer… not exactly a coincidence, and definitely not a “normal restructuring.” The kind of move you make when you know the rules are changing and you want zero surprises when the money shows up. Of course, none of that stopped Meta. If anything, it probably sped things up. In the AI land grab, messy details just thin the herd.

So with a million other startups already purchased on his belt, why did Zuck have to have this one? Well, Manus claims it has processed over 147 trillion tokens and powered more than 80 million virtual computers. That’s not marketing fluff… that’s battle-tested infrastructure. Even Microsoft has already tested Manus agents inside Windows 11.

And remember, Meta’s biggest need is reliable automation it can scale across WhatsApp, Instagram, enterprise tools, ads, and whatever headset comes next. And based on the $2 billion check he just wrote, Manus fit that bill too cleanly for Zuck to pass up.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta and Microsoft as mentioned in the article.