"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."

Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.

These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.

1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products 2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products 3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.

TBF 1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others 2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.

But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one

They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).

At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.

Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.

Who is paying? No clue, must be big in China.

I skipped going to their hackathon :')

Hope Meta doesn't hose it.

But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.

Curious how much Meta paid them.

Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.

That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.

I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.

Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.

2 billion is the price.

- Erik Meijer

https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20

I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.

Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.

I have many questions:

- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?

- Did they grossly overpay?

- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?

- Will Manus' top talent bail?

- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?

- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?

The acquisition is confusing to me.

Is it, now?

These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.

It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.

Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?

I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.

---

You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.

It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.

I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.

I hope the great product continues.