Manus Is Still Undervalued

On December 30, 2025, Meta announced it would acquire Manus, an AI agent platform. The reported price was $2 billion to $3 billion, the third-largest acquisition in Meta's history. Founder Xiao Hong became a vice president at Meta, and the team stayed in Singapore. Manus launched in March 2025. Within eight months it went from zero to more than $100 million in ARR, with a revenue run rate above $125 million, and it has processed more than 147 trillion tokens in total. After the deal Manus kept operating independently while starting to plug into Meta's ecosystem. It has integrated Meta Ads Manager, a personal agent on Telegram is live, and a WhatsApp integration is in progress. Reactions to the acquisition split sharply. In February, the LSE Business Review argued that the deal reflects overheated AI valuations: traditional SaaS companies trade at 5 to 20 times revenue, while AI companies have been pushed to 25 to 50 times. In January, CNBC reported that some longtime Manus users were moving to other products because they didn't trust Meta. The doubts are many, and the core of them is whether $2 billion-plus for a product less than a year old is too much. The churn and the valuation questions are real, but they point to controversy over the acquisition itself, and the product's direction is a separate matter. A year ago I wrote a piece on Manus (Chinese). My judgment then was that its innovation was in engineering: it delivers a product that completes tasks automatically, and users don't have to assemble a workflow out of tools. That judgment hasn't changed. After a year, though, several things point somewhere different. What the price ceiling says A product's pricing structure often says more than its user count. When Manus launched paid subscriptions last year, the top tier cost about $5,000 a month. Today its top subscription is about $16,667 a month ($199,000 billed annually), for 5 million credits. That price isn't aimed at people trying the product out. It is anchored on heavy users and teams who have built Manus deep into their workfl