From Wuhan to Silicon Valley, Manus generated billions of dollars in acquisitions in just nine months.

Author: Frog, Deep Tide TechFlow

The biggest news in the AI world today: Meta acquired Manus for billions of dollars.

This is Meta's third-largest acquisition in history, after WhatsApp and Scale AI, and it was even more expensive than the acquisition of Instagram.

Looking at Manus' timeline, you can see that the product was launched in March of this year and it was acquired in December. From launch to sale, it took a total of 9 months .

Founder Xiao Hong, from Ji'an, Jiangxi Province, graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and started his business in Wuhan. His first product was Yiban, a WeChat official account layout tool, which he sold. His second product was Weiban, a WeChat CRM tool for businesses, which he also sold. His third product was Monica, a browser AI plugin, which he didn't sell, but it was criticized.

What are you cursing? It's just a shell.

At that time, the industry consensus was that only companies that made large models had a future, while those that applied other people's models were just wrappers and had no technical content.

When Manus first became popular in March of this year, co-founder Ji Yichao said in response to netizens' questions on social media: "We have used Claude and different versions of Qwen (千问) for fine-tuning models."

It means using someone else's large model and building your own application layer.

What's wrong?

It is now worth billions of dollars.

Last year, ByteDance executives flew to Hong Kong to meet with Xiao Hong, offering $30 million to acquire the company. Xiao Hong refused to sell.

Looking back now, the difference between 30 million and billions wasn't just a year, it was:

A product has been made.

In addition, we think the most interesting part of this story is not the ending, but the process.

In July of this year, Manus made a decision: to move the company from China to Singapore. Of the 120-person team, only 40 core technical personnel were retained and moved with them; the rest were laid off. The Beijing office was closed, and the Wuhan office was also closed.

At the time, many people criticized them for being "smooth sailing".

In hindsight, this step was necessary. In the current climate, it's virtually impossible for a Chinese company to pass approval when it's acquired by an American tech giant. Changing the place of registration removes the obstacle.

The negotiations took only 10 days.

Liu Yuan, a partner at ZhenFund, said that it was so fast that they initially suspected it might be a fake offer.

How rushed was Meta to finalize a multi-billion dollar deal in just 10 days?

Looking at the background, Meta's capital expenditure on AI this year exceeded $70 billion, but most of it went into infrastructure, resulting in few usable products. OpenAI has ChatGPT, Google has Gemini, what does Meta have?

Llama is open source, so anyone can use it. Meta needed a powerful application-layer product, and Manus just happened to be a ready-made one.

Annualized revenue of $125 million, built from scratch in 8 months, global users, subscription model, and it's a viable business model.

This isn't acquiring a team, it's acquiring an entity:

A proven business model .

Interestingly, Manus's investor list includes Sequoia China, Tencent, and ZhenFund. When these funds were invested, the valuation was in the tens of millions of dollars. Now, exiting with these funds would yield returns of several tens of times.

So you see, a Chinese VC invested in a Chinese company, the company moved to Singapore, and it was acquired by an American company. The Chinese VC made money off the American company.

This chain is even more agent than Manus's products.

Following the acquisition, Xiao Hong became Vice President of Meta. A startup founder who began in Wuhan creating a WeChat official account layout tool is now reporting to Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley.

Liu Yuan of ZhenFund once said, "The era belonging to this generation of young entrepreneurs in China has arrived."

That statement may only be half true.

The era has indeed arrived, but it has arrived in the form of moving the company.