GenAI Daily - January 31, 2026: Meta's $2B Manus Integration, Falcon-H1R Breaks Efficiency Records, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol

Top Story

China's Ministry of Commerce announced it will investigate Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus to assess its compliance with export control laws. Meta acquired Singapore-based Manus last month as the U.S. tech giant looks to integrate advanced automation into its consumer and enterprise products.

The acquisition, completed in late December 2025, signals the definitive shift from conversational AI to the era of action-oriented agents. Manus is behind the world's most advanced general-purpose autonomous agents, and the deal underscores Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to winning the "agentic" race - a transition where AI is no longer just a chatbot that answers questions, but a digital employee that executes complex, multi-step tasks across the internet.

Manus said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in December, eight months on from launching a product, which it claimed made it the fastest startup in the world to hit the milestone from $0.

Manus began as a product of Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect, also known as Monica.Im, before growing into a separate entity, which relocated to Singapore earlier this year. The startup was hailed as the next DeepSeek after it launched its first AI agent in March, which can help with tasks such as market research, coding and data analysis.

Why it matters: Meta's massive acquisition bet on autonomous agents reflects the industry's shift to the "execution layer" of AI, where systems actually perform tasks rather than just generate responses - but geopolitical tensions over AI technology exports could complicate integration.

Key Developments

Falcon-H1R Redefines Efficiency in AI Reasoning

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) announced the release of Falcon H1R 7B, a next-generation AI model that delivers world-class reasoning performance in a compact, efficient format. With just 7 billion parameters, Falcon H1R 7B challenges and, in many cases, outperforms larger open-source AI models from around the world, including models from Microsoft (Phi 4 Reasoning Plus 14B), Alibaba (Qwen3 32B), and NVIDIA (Nemotron H 47B).

The model achieved 88.1% on AIME-24, outperforming ServiceNow AI's Apriel 1.5 (15B) (86.2%) and delivered 68.6% accuracy on coding tasks, with Falcon H1R scoring 34% compared to China's DeepSeek R1-0528 Qwen 3 8B (26.9%) and even surpassing larger contenders like Qwen3-32B (33.4%).

The model achieves up to 1,500 tokens/sec/GPU at batch 64, nearly doubling the speed of China's Qwen3-8B, thanks to its hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture.

TII

Impact: Falcon H1R's performance demonstrates that efficient, smaller models can outperform systems 7x their size, potentially reducing enterprise AI compute costs while maintaining accuracy.

Google Launches Universal Commerce Protocol for AI Shopping

Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard designed to power the next generation of agentic commerce. By establishing a common language and functional primitives, UCP enables seamless commerce journeys between consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers.

The standard, developed with companies like Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, lets agents work across different parts of customer buying processes, including discovery and post-purchase support.

UCP is developed by Google in collaboration with industry leaders including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart endorsed by over 20 global partners across the ecosystem like Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy's Inc, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, Zalando.

UCP will soon power a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, allowing shoppers to check out from eligible U.S. retailers right as they're researching on Google. The feature is built with security at its core: shoppers can buy confidently with Google Pay using payment methods and shipping info already saved in Google Wallet and soon, will be able to make a purchase with PayPal.

TechCrunch | Google Developers

Impact: UCP standardizes AI-driven commerce, potentially reducing friction in online shopping while giving retailers direct access to high-intent moments within AI interfaces.

Funding & Deals

• Decagon - $250M Series D:

AI startup that builds "concierge" customer support agents raised $250 million in a Series D round led by Coatue Management and Index Ventures. The funding comes just six months after its previous round, tripling Decagon's valuation to $4.5 billion. Decagon's conversational AI platform is being adopted rapidly: the company signed over 100 new enterprise customers in 2025 across industries like travel, hospitality, finance, and retail.

• Led by Coatue Management and Index Ventures (Tech Startups)

• PaleBlueDot AI - $150M Series B:

Silicon Valley startup building a "neocloud" for AI workloads raised $150 million Series B funding round led by B Capital. The fresh funding values the company at over $1 billion and will accelerate the deployment of its high-performance GPU compute platform across key regions (North America, Europe, and Asia).

• Led by B Capital (Tech Startups)

• Waabi - $1B Combined Funding:

Canadian developer of autonomous driving software closed a combined $750 million Series C and $250 million funding milestone investment (totaling $1 billion). The oversubscribed round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, with about $250 million coming from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 Waabi-powered robotaxis on its ride-hailing platform.

• Led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners (Tech Startups)

Related reading: Check out this week's Deep Insights analysis for strategic context on these developments.