The ink barely dried on Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus before customers started heading for the exits. Spooked by concerns about how the social media giant handles data, some Manus users have already abandoned the platform for competitors—a stark signal that Meta's enterprise ambitions keep running into the same problem: trust. As the company tries to establish itself as a serious AI player alongside OpenAI and Google, it's discovering that a $2 billion price tag can't fix a reputation problem.
When Meta announced its $2 billion acquisition of Manus at the end of December, executives were clear about their ambitions: take this Singapore-based AI agent startup and scale it across the company's consumer and enterprise products. The vision sounded straightforward enough. But less than a month later, some of Manus's most loyal customers are already gone.
Seth Dobrin, co-founder and CEO of Arya Labs, was actually a fan of Manus before the deal closed. His company uses what's called world models—AI systems that can simulate and predict future outcomes—and he found Manus's general-purpose AI agents to be the perfect tool. Then Meta bought it. "I'm legitimately sad that this has happened," Dobrin told CNBC. "I do not agree with a lot of Meta's practices around data and how they essentially weaponize people's personal data against them."
It's not just Dobrin. Karl Yeh, co-founder of consulting firm 0260.AI, which advises startups on integrating AI tools, stopped using Manus entirely and recommended his clients do the same. The concern is simple but potentially fatal: if Meta absorbs Manus, won't Meta's data policies eventually apply to the platform? "Will the data policies of Meta apply to Manus? I would assume it will eventually," Yeh said. "That was the concern we had and why we stopped recommending it to our clients."
This is the customer exodus that nobody talks about during acquisition announcements. Manus claimed it had reached millions of paying customers with a revenue run rate exceeding $125 million when the deal closed, according to the company's blog post. The startup had built real momentum by offering AI agents that could handle complex tasks like market research, coding, and data analysis. Then one of the world's largest tech companies bought it, and some of those customers immediately looked elsewhere.
Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy—a direct Manus competitor—actually saw a silver lining in the news. "We think there was sort of a halo effect from the announcement," he said. "It raised awareness about this category of software and people started researching it." But Crivello, who spent nearly five years at Uber working on acquisitions, thinks Meta's real play here is smaller than it appears. Manus isn't being bought to capture the enterprise software market. It's being positioned to serve small businesses and independent contractors—a move that makes strategic sense given that small businesses have long been crucial to Meta's ad revenue machine.
