Manus

In December 2025, Meta announced the acquisition of Manus for more than 2 billion dollars, its third largest deal after WhatsApp and Scale AI. The price closes a fast repricing: 100 million dollars at the end of 2024, when the company still operated under the name Monica, 500 million in April 2025 after the pivot to Manus and a round led by Benchmark, then over 2 billion at acquisition.

Xiao Hong founded the company in China, with Tencent, HongShan and ZhenFund among its investors. In mid-2025 it relocated to Singapore, and that move is what made an American buyer possible. The deal commits Meta to sever operational links and data flows with China and to buy out the Chinese investors. It remains under CFIUS review. Senator John Cornyn had already described Benchmark's investment in Manus as American capital subsidizing an adversary.

Xiao Hong joins Meta as a vice president with his team, and Meta plans to fold the agents into WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook and Meta AI, platforms it counts at 3 billion daily users. Alongside the corporate story sits a smaller engineering trace: @peakji, who works at Manus, calls the cache hit rate the most important metric for a production AI agent, a line Lance Martin of Anthropic quoted while documenting prompt caching on the Claude API. The company that sold autonomy for 2 billion dollars measures itself on what its context window costs per turn.