Meta’s $2 billion Manus deal pushes away some of startup’s customers, who are ‘sad that this has happened’

When Meta agreed to spend a reported $2 billion on Manus at the end of last year, the social media giant said it planned to take the startup’s subscription AI agent offering and “scale this service to many more businesses.”

But some existing Manus customers aren’t thrilled with the deal and say they’re now going elsewhere, the latest sign of skepticism toward Meta as it tries to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in the booming artificial intelligence market. 

Manus, a developer of general purpose AI agents, was founded in China in 2022 before relocating to Singapore. Last year, the company launched its first general AI agent, which can be customized to execute complex tasks such as market research, coding and data analysis. 

Seth Dobrin, co-founder and CEO of Arya Labs, said Manus was his favorite agentic AI platform, but his company, which develops a type of so-called world models, is no longer using it under Meta’s ownership. Dobrin told CNBC that while he had confidence in Manus’ transparent terms of service, he doesn’t have that level of trust in Meta and is “legitimately sad that this has happened.”

“I do not agree with a lot of Meta’s practices around data and how they essentially weaponize people’s personal data against them,” said Dobrin, who helped launch Arya last year. “I don’t want to engage with a company who I don’t feel comfortable with how they’re going to use data.”

Meta, which gets almost all of its $200 billion in annualized revenue from ads, said on Dec. 29, that its purchase of Manus was aimed at accelerating AI innovation for businesses and integrating advanced automation into its consumer and enterprise products, including its Meta AI assistant. 

Manus said in a blog post on the day of the deal that it had reached millions of paying customers and a revenue run rate of more than $125 million.

“Our top priority is ensuring that this change won’t be disruptive for our customers,”  Manus said. “We will continue to sell and operate our product subscription service through our app and website. The company will continue to operate from Singapore.”

Despite those assurances, Dobrin isn’t alone in his concern.

Karl Yeh, co-founder of consulting firm 0260.AI, which advises startups on how to integrate AI tools, said he stopped using Manus at his company and has advised his clients to follow suit. 

“Will the data policies of Meta apply to Manus? I would assume it will eventually,” Yeh told CNBC. “That was the concern we had and why we stopped recommending it to our clients.”

“We don’t know where Manus is going to fit into Meta’s AI road map,” Yeh said. “We’re not sure if Manus is going to still remain a separate company even though they said it would.”

Yeh said he’s moving to services from a startup called Genspark or somewhere else where there’s more certainty because, “In terms of Meta, we’re just not sure.”

Meta didn’t provide a comment beyond pointing to the blog post, which notes that, “We’re excited to welcome the Manus team and help improve the lives of billions of people and millions of businesses with their technology.”

Meta has opened its wallets to try and win in AI, most notably spending more than $14 billion in June to hire Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and a handful of his top engineers and researchers and secure a stake in his startup. But unlike AI model leaders OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, Meta has yet to land on a long-term strategy in the market, particularly when it comes to competing in the enterprise. 

Meta’s stock is down 17% since CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in October that AI costs will keep growing. Analysts anticipate 2026 spending on AI could top $100 billion. Meta is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results next week. 

Flo Crivello, CEO of a Manus competitor, Lindy, said his company initially saw a bump in users after news of Meta’s acquisition. 

“We think there was sort of a halo effect from the announcement,” Crivello said. “It raised awareness about this category of software and people started researching it.” 

Crivello, who previously spent almost five years at Uber and worked on acquisitions, said he thinks Meta’s rationale is less about bringing in enterprise customers, and more targeted at serving small businesses, which have long been crucial to Meta’s ad revenue. 

Crivello said Manus is “focused on very small business owners like independent contractors,” and said it could take a while for Meta to figure out where it takes Manus from here. 

“The way these companies think of these acquisitions, they’re acquiring the company for a specific, strategic reason — they just don’t know precisely what the integration might look like yet,” Crivello said. “They cut a check, it’s a new thing they add to the chess board and then they figure it out. And sometimes it takes them years to figure out what to do.”

Outside of advertising, Meta has struggled in several areas where it’s tried to crack the enterprise. The company announced in 2024 that it was shuttering its Workplace communication and productivity platform, two years after discontinuing its Portal video calling device. 

Last week, Meta said it’s sunsetting its Workrooms virtual reality app, part of a broader pivot away from VR, which had been Zuckerberg’s big focus area before AI took off. 

Navrina Singh, founder and CEO of governance startup Credo AI, says she doesn’t see Fortune 500 companies embracing Meta’s tools. 

“Among large enterprises — particularly in highly regulated sectors like health care and financial services — many AI deployments today are built on models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic,” Singh said. Then they’re typically run through cloud platforms operated by Microsoft or Amazon, “where trust, security, and accountability requirements are well-established and prioritized,” she said.

One area where Meta is finding success in the business world is WhatsApp, the messaging platform it acquired for $19 billion in 2014. WhatsApp for Business has become a popular way for companies to interact with customers. Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Evercore, has projected WhatsApp could generate $40 billion in revenue by 2030. 

“Business messaging remains a significant opportunity for us,” Meta CFO Susan Li said on the company’s last earnings call. “We’re also making good progress on our business AI efforts, where we’ve been focused on building a turnkey AI that helps businesses generate leads and drive sales.” 

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