There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.
Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons
Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.
Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!
No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.
If you are having problems attracting users, even when free, consider that maybe your product doesn't offer much value to them. I say this as someone who has bootstrapped a 7 figure software business.
Well, it helps I don't care about getting to 9 figures. As long as I make enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, I'm not going to sacrifice my family or my sanity to become some kind of unstable unicorn.
Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.
WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].
They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.
Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.
The data labeler has been instructed to build products, so he splurges on a company, which, unlike 95% of AI startups, at least has a functioning website.
Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.
Who are you in this scenario though? Are you ManusAI getting bought for a giant pile of money? Are you a vendor that supplies Meta for their VR hardware that's getting paid in money? Are you an employee at Meta getting paid in money and Meta shares to build the Metaverse? Are you a shareholder of Meta who's stock is up? Like, sure, we can sit back and laugh at no legs, but Meta spent money they had on a thing they wanted to do. Sure, it didn't pan out, like that time I tried to pick up scuba diving, but when you have that much money, you can afford to try things that don't work. What's better, to try and fail, or never try because someone might make fun of you? If I just sold a company for half a billion, you could call me all the names you want, I wouldn't be able to hear you over the engines of my private fighter jet.
I understand what they are arguing, but they are just lobbing insinuations at the crowd. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed they had specific insight into the people and relationships inside the transaction that could be shared.
