Why did they relocate to Singapore before?
Artificial Intelligence thread
- Thread starter 9dashline
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Actually good acquisition by Meta
Manus was a quickly growing startup and had good R&D and working product on agentic workflows but still had the common issue that startups have, user acquisition
Meta has a huge established user base, but is behind AI and agents.
Meta gains Manus' very valuable data, r&d in agents and ai integration, and established user base of experienced developers/users to test and quickly iterate it's AI models.
And Manu will gain access to the huge user base and vast resources of Meta.
Imo perfect acquisition. Alexander Wang doing good work
For this very reason!
THIS IS PURELY SPECULATIVE!
The founders of Manus AI could not compete in the shark-infested market—arguably the most competitive in the world: China. Manus wanted to differentiate itself from the competition, and the only realistic way to do so was outside China, due to existing regulations and pre-existing constraints (a.k.a. the CPC). I specifically said the CPC because Manus intended to differentiate by building a platform free from the traditional constraints inherent in China's ecosystem.
They saw the opportunity and jumped at the chance to set up shop in Singapore—a country deeply connected and integrated with all major Western financial hubs, as well as a key shipping and docking stop in Southeast Asia.
From there, the company worked hard to grow and take itself to new heights. They achieved this by constantly pushing product developments and introducing new features (even if those features didn't always work exactly as marketed or advertised). The important metric was to build enough hype—since hype is the currency most coveted and always in vogue with Western financial institutions, investors, and above all, U.S. tech giants like Meta.
We all know that among the Magnificent 7 companies (Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, etc.), Meta has been the weakest—or at least, that's the growing perception in both public and private spheres. Despite the company's massive hiring and spending binge, it has yet to produce an AI product on par with Anthropic's Claude Opus, ChatGPT, Google's Gemini/Nano, or even Elon Musk's Grok...
This latest announcement of Meta essentially acquiring Manus AI is their way of getting the market—and the so-called experts—to talk about Meta in a way that makes it seem less like an afterthought.
- Expand user base to whole world
- Improve reputation ("no Chinese crap")
- Lesser AI regulations
- Larger valuation of company
- Expand access to international capital (linked to previous reason)
- Expand access to computing and western AI models
- Expand access to diverse AI researchers
Few reasons why they might have wanted to move to Singapore
Even early on (during the DeepSeek moment), Manus faced backlash in China not for performance, but for being perceived as overhyped and insufficiently “domestic,” with early accusations that it relied on foreign models rather than a fully homegrown stack.
(The article dates from March 2025)
(The article dates from March 2025)
Keyboard warriors are always like this.
What matters im the real world, is revenue. And Manus, is the fastest startup to from $0 to $100 million ARR (took them only 8 months). Growing more than 20% MoM
And by now, they are probably using fine tuned open source models
I wonder why other Chinese companies didn't try to acquire them? Like Tencent, Alibaba, bytedance?
My understanding is that they mainly use core models from qwen, chatgpt, and Claude but put their own skin on it.
Not sure if there was anything that can be done to keep them in Chinese hands.
Hopefully this doesn't cause other Chinese AI companies to all try to leave.
I wish but I doubt it. For all intents and purposes, Manus no longer has any legal or political obligations to China.