Ten days. That's how long it takes most companies to schedule the first meeting. Meta saw what they needed and moved.
The valuation jump tells the story: Benchmark led a $75M round at $500M valuation in April. Eight months later, Meta paid 4x that. The agents aren't demos—they screen job candidates, plan vacations, analyze portfolios. Production infrastructure that works at scale.
What makes this wild: Meta has Llama models, infinite compute, top-tier talent. What they couldn't build fast enough was the orchestration layer that turns models into products people actually use. So they bought it.
The China angle adds complexity. Manus was founded in Beijing, relocated to Singapore mid-2025. Meta's requiring them to sever all Chinese investor ties and shut down China operations. The AI supply chain is splitting in real time—Chinese talent is valuable, Chinese companies are radioactive for US acquirers. The solution: relocate, sanitize, sell.
This is December's seventh major AI acquisition. ServiceNow bought Armis for $7.75B, IBM grabbed Confluent for $11B, Cursor acquired Graphite, Anthropic bought Bun, Nvidia took Slurm. Companies are buying capabilities they can't build fast enough. The message: if you have production AI infrastructure that works, someone will pay whatever it takes.