Meta's Manus acquisition is Big Tech's latest big bet on AI
By Steve Goldstein
One analyst compares Manus deal to WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions
Meta is the latest technology company to announce an AI deal in the closing days of 2025.
Giant tech companies are closing the year with a flurry of deals as they position for further advances in artificial intelligence.
Meta's acquisition of Manus, a Singapore firm that has developed autonomous general-purpose agents, comes after SoftBank's deal for DigitalBridge to acquire an investor in data centers and Nvidia's licensing deal with Groq, a maker of AI inference technology.
Meta late Monday night did not announce a purchase price but the Wall Street Journal reported the Manus cost was more than $2 billion.
Manus last raised money at a $500 million valuation in April, according to Crunchbase.
Chetan Puttagunta, a general partner at venture-capital firm Benchmark, which invested in Manus, said the company created the fastest product to go from zero to a $100 million annual run rate and changed how consumers used AI to get things done.
Meta said the Manus service will continue but also will be integrated into its products.
"We see a natural fit into Meta's fast-growing, WhatsApp [small and medium-sized business] footprint, with extensions into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's agentic-rich vision of personal AI. Time will tell, but the initial read has to be that this deal has potential to stand with Meta's acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 as potentially transformative for the company," said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett.
Meta shares (META) rose 1.1% on Tuesday. The stock has gained about 14% this year.
-Steve Goldstein
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12-30-25 1939ET
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