After news of the acquisition of Manus by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta broke out, dominating headlines with a shocking price tag of $2 billion, the world of AI has . However, it is its CEO who is getting all the attention at the moment, who rejected an earlier acquisition proposition by Bytedance and soldiered on to increase his company’s market valuation to a mega $100 million. Affectionately called “Red Xiao”, he is now pushed into the spotlight as a 33-year-old Chinese prodigy.
What began as a modest student side hustle crafting WeChat tools back in 2015 has evolved into Manus.im, which is the “world’s first general AI agent” was unveiled on March 6, 2025. Manus shattered expectations by autonomously handling complex tasks like full-stack code deployment, personalised travel itineraries, stock analysis, and even video editing, outpacing rivals on rigorous GAIA benchmarks and sparking a frenzy where beta access invites fetched up to 100,000 yuan on resale markets.
As he now reports directly to Meta’s chief operating officer, Xiao merges his Singapore-registered Butterfly Effect Pte. Ltd. with Meta’s colossal infrastructure, fusing Manus’s multi-model architecture—rumoured to integrate advanced systems like Claude—for seamless agentic workflows. The acquisition positions Meta to dominate beyond chatbots amid US-China tech tensions.
Xiao Hong: A look at his early days
Xiao’s entrepreneurial spark ignited during his software engineering studies at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, where average grades failed to give a true impression of his hustle. Still determined, Hong partnered with sharper technical classmates to develop addictive WeChat utilities amid China’s social app boom. Launching Nightingale Technology in 2015, he debuted Yiban Assistant, a powerhouse for WeChat group management and automation that snagged early investment from ZhenFund and scaled massively.
When rivals shuttered under regulatory pressure, Xiao rebranded to Weiban Assistant, cementing market dominance and culminating in its acquisition by Minglue Technology, serving millions of users.
Monica.ai comes into play for AI glory
Fast-forward to 2022, Xiao founded Monica.ai as a sleek “ChatGPT for Google” browser extension. It morphed into a global phenomenon with 10 million users craving productivity boosts like real-time search augmentation and document synthesis. Fueled by marquee investors including ZhenFund, Tencent, and Sequoia Capital China, Monica refused a lucrative $30 million acquisition bid from ByteDance and soldiered on towards a near-$100 million valuation by late 2024 through relentless iteration and user-centric features. This phase modified Xiao’s edge in navigating geopolitical hurdles, collecting proprietary datasets that would supercharge his next leap.
The Manus breakthrough and acquisition drama
Manus emerged as Monica’s crowning evolution, a true autonomous agent blending planning, execution, and self-correction across domains. Think booking flights end-to-end or debugging live apps without human prompts, all by leveraging an ensemble of frontier models for superior reliability.
Its March 2025 debut ignited viral buzz in China and beyond, drawing comparisons to DeepSeek while igniting security debates over data handling in multi-model setups. Meta’s acquisition on December 29, 2025, not only validates Xiao’s bet but injects Manus’s battle-tested user base into Meta’s Llama ecosystem, in the hope to accelerate agentic AI for billions.
