According to Bloomberg and multiple sources, the entire acquisition process—from initial contact to deal closure—took just over ten days, a pace that even left early investor ZhenFund astonished. Manus’s parent company, “Butterfly Effect,” will continue to operate independently, while founder Xiao Hong will assume the role of Meta Vice President. The team led by this Huazhong University of Science and Technology graduate had previously secured a $500 million valuation in a Series B round led by top Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.
The core value of this acquisition lies in Manus’s validated commercialization capabilities. Its general-purpose AI agent system has already achieved $125 million in annual recurring revenue, handling high-value tasks such as resume screening and financial analysis across multiple domains. Notably, the team previously developed the Monica browser plugin, which has generated stable cash flow—a perfect match for Meta’s strategic need to turn its $600 billion infrastructure investments into visible returns.
As computing power infrastructure deployment matures, the competitive focus for major model vendors is shifting toward application-layer monetization. Meta’s move comes at a pivotal moment when its AI strategy is transitioning from the investment phase to the return phase. During the latest earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg admitted, “We need to demonstrate AI’s profit potential to investors.” Manus’s technology will accelerate Meta’s AI service rollout across Facebook, Instagram, and smart glasses ecosystems, enabling differentiated competition against rivals like OpenAI and Google.
This deal also reflects a new global expansion path for China’s emerging entrepreneurs. The Butterfly Effect team started in Wuhan, transitioned through Singapore, and ultimately secured a premium acquisition from a tech giant—a trajectory that breaks traditional overseas expansion models. ZhenFund partner Dai Yusen commented that this signals Chinese young founders now possess the “hard power to compete head-on in the core AI battleground.”