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From Wuhan to Silicon Valley, Manus did it in just nine months.
Source: TechFlow (Shenchao)
Today’s biggest news in the AI world: Meta acquires Manus for several billion dollars.
This is Meta’s third-largest acquisition in its history, behind only WhatsApp and Scale AI—and more expensive than its acquisition of Instagram.
Looking at Manus’s timeline, the speed is striking. The product launched in March this year and was acquired in December. From release to exit: just nine months.
The founder, Xiao Hong, is from Ji’an, Jiangxi, and a graduate of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His entrepreneurial journey began in Wuhan.
His first product was Yiban, a WeChat content formatting tool—sold.
The second was Weiban, a WeCom CRM product—also sold.
The third was Monica, a browser-based AI plugin—not sold, but heavily criticized.
Criticized for what?
For being a “wrapper.”
At the time, the prevailing industry belief was that only companies building large models had real prospects. Applications built on top of others’ models were dismissed as “shells” with no technical depth.
When Manus first went viral in March, co-founder Ji Yichao responded to questions on social media, saying:
“We’ve used Claude, and we’ve also used different fine-tuned versions of Qwen.”
In other words, they used other companies’ foundation models and focused on the application layer.
So what?
That approach is now worth billions of dollars.
Last year, senior executives from ByteDance flew to Hong Kong to meet Xiao Hong, offering USD 30 million to acquire Manus. He declined.
In hindsight, the gap between USD 30 million and several billion is not one year of time. It is this:
A product was truly built.
What makes this story most interesting is not the ending, but the process.
In July this year, Manus made a decisive move: relocating the company from China to Singapore. Out of a 120-person team, only 40 core technical staff moved together; the rest were laid off. The Beijing office was shut down, and the Wuhan office was closed as well.
At the time, many criticized the company for “leaving.”
Looking back, the move was necessary. Under current conditions, it would be nearly impossible for a Chinese company to be acquired by a U.S. tech giant and pass regulatory approval. Changing the place of incorporation removed that barrier.
The negotiation took just 10 days.
Liu Yuan, a partner at ZhenFund, said it was so fast that they initially suspected the offer might be fake.
Closing a multi-billion-dollar deal in 10 days—how urgent was Meta?
The context is revealing. This year, Meta’s capital expenditure on AI exceeded USD 70 billion, but most of it went into infrastructure. In terms of usable, consumer-facing products, there were few standouts.
OpenAI has ChatGPT.
Google has Gemini.
What does Meta have?
Llama is open source—anyone can use it. Meta needed a strong application-layer product, and Manus was ready-made.
Annualized revenue of USD 125 million, built from zero in eight months, global users, subscription-based, fully validated.
This was not an acquisition of a team. It was an acquisition of a proven business model.
Another interesting detail: Manus’s investor list includes Sequoia China, Tencent, and ZhenFund. When they invested, the valuation was in the tens of millions. At exit, returns were dozens of times that.
So the chain looks like this:
Chinese VCs invest in a Chinese company → the company relocates to Singapore → it is acquired by a U.S. company → Chinese VCs earn money from an American acquirer.
That chain is more “agent-like” than Manus’s own product.
After the acquisition, Xiao Hong becomes a Vice President at Meta. A founder who started in Wuhan, building a WeChat formatting tool, is now heading to Silicon Valley to report directly to Mark Zuckerberg.
Liu Yuan of ZhenFund summed it up with one line:
“An era for China’s new generation of young entrepreneurs has arrived.”
That statement may only be half true.
The era has indeed arrived—but it arrived by moving the company elsewhere.
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Mixin has launched USTD-margined perpetual contracts, bringing derivative trading into the chat scene.
The privacy-focused crypto wallet Mixin announced today the launch of its U-based perpetual contract (a derivative priced in USDT). Unlike traditional exchanges, Mixin has taken a new approach by "liberating" derivative trading from isolated matching engines and embedding it into the instant messaging environment.
Users can directly open positions within the app with leverage of up to 200x, while sharing positions, discussing strategies, and copy trading within private communities. Trading, social interaction, and asset management are integrated into the same interface.
Based on its non-custodial architecture, Mixin has eliminated friction from the traditional onboarding process, allowing users to participate in perpetual contract trading without identity verification.
The trading process has been streamlined into five steps:
· Choose the trading asset
· Select long or short
· Input position size and leverage
· Confirm order details
· Confirm and open the position
The interface provides real-time visualization of price, position, and profit and loss (PnL), allowing users to complete trades without switching between multiple modules.
Mixin has directly integrated social features into the derivative trading environment. Users can create private trading communities and interact around real-time positions:
· End-to-end encrypted private groups supporting up to 1024 members
· End-to-end encrypted voice communication
· One-click position sharing
· One-click trade copying
On the execution side, Mixin aggregates liquidity from multiple sources and accesses decentralized protocol and external market liquidity through a unified trading interface.
By combining social interaction with trade execution, Mixin enables users to collaborate, share, and execute trading strategies instantly within the same environment.
Mixin has also introduced a referral incentive system based on trading behavior:
· Users can join with an invite code
· Up to 60% of trading fees as referral rewards
· Incentive mechanism designed for long-term, sustainable earnings
This model aims to drive user-driven network expansion and organic growth.
Mixin's derivative transactions are built on top of its existing self-custody wallet infrastructure, with core features including:
· Separation of transaction account and asset storage
· User full control over assets
· Platform does not custody user funds
· Built-in privacy mechanisms to reduce data exposure
The system aims to strike a balance between transaction efficiency, asset security, and privacy protection.
Against the background of perpetual contracts becoming a mainstream trading tool, Mixin is exploring a different development direction by lowering barriers, enhancing social and privacy attributes.
The platform does not only view transactions as execution actions but positions them as a networked activity: transactions have social attributes, strategies can be shared, and relationships between individuals also become part of the financial system.
Mixin's design is based on a user-initiated, user-controlled model. The platform neither custodies assets nor executes transactions on behalf of users.
This model aligns with a statement issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 13, 2026, titled "Staff Statement on Whether Partial User Interface Used in Preparing Cryptocurrency Securities Transactions May Require Broker-Dealer Registration."
The statement indicates that, under the premise where transactions are entirely initiated and controlled by users, non-custodial service providers that offer neutral interfaces may not need to register as broker-dealers or exchanges.
Mixin is a decentralized, self-custodial privacy wallet designed to provide secure and efficient digital asset management services.
Its core capabilities include:
· Aggregation: integrating multi-chain assets and routing between different transaction paths to simplify user operations
· High liquidity access: connecting to various liquidity sources, including decentralized protocols and external markets
· Decentralization: achieving full user control over assets without relying on custodial intermediaries
· Privacy protection: safeguarding assets and data through MPC, CryptoNote, and end-to-end encrypted communication
Mixin has been in operation for over 8 years, supporting over 40 blockchains and more than 10,000 assets, with a global user base exceeding 10 million and an on-chain self-custodied asset scale of over $1 billion.
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