Comment by dinniwang
11 hours ago
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
My observation is that 100m ARR in this AI economy is impressive but not particularly rare. There's a lot of hype sales and WoM sales going on.
It really does seem like friends giving friends a piece of the pie before it all blows up.
Congrats, you have summarized the majority of SV startups.
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.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...
[2]: https://archive.is/ykBOm
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...
If two $1B companies 'merge' and the surviving entity gives the acquired entity $1B in shares, it didnt 'cost' the acquiring entity anything.
Facebook's stock was up 20% later in the year after the acquisition.
Facebook was worth $134.2-139.2B end of 2013 and $217.5-218.5B end of 2014.
I would say it is misleading to say it cost them $15B in shares if the remaining shares FB kept ended up more valuable after the transaction.
Whatsapp had almost 0.5b users at the time of acquisition, and it was (still is) wildly popular in emerging markets and europe.
Go on.
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.
You're telling me the folks who brought us the metaverse that revolutionized our lives are making dumb investments? That's a bold claim.
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.
Could you elaborate on this?
You should elaborate on this more.
Please continue