Manus has raised more than $500M, the first money it has taken since Chinese regulators forced Meta to hand the company back. Butterfly Effect, its parent, announced the round on 8 October through a WeChat post, with Boyu Capital and IDG Capital co-leading and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund following on.
Manus sells an AI agent, software that is given a written goal and then carries out the multi-step work itself rather than answering a question. Résumé screening and stock analysis were the tasks it demonstrated at launch, and it now charges subscriptions for research, coding and document work.
Bloomberg reported a valuation of around $4B in September, before the round closed. Manus has not confirmed that figure and did not answer questions about it.
Butterfly Effect was founded in China in 2022, moved its headquarters to Singapore in mid-2025, and sits under a Cayman Islands parent, while a registered Chinese entity remains in Beijing. Describing the company by nationality therefore takes a sentence rather than a word. Around 40 core engineers made the move, and most of the other China-based staff were let go.
Beijing Unwound A Finished Deal
Meta announced its purchase of Manus on 29 December 2025, at a price the Wall Street Journal reported as more than $2B. A Meta spokesperson said at the time that there would be no continuing Chinese ownership and that Manus would stop operating in China.
China's Ministry of Commerce opened an investigation the following month, and in March the co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving the country. On 27 April the National Development and Reform Commission, China's economic planning agency, prohibited the investment and ordered the parties to withdraw the transaction.
Meta cut the company off in June, walling Manus staff out of its internal systems before telling employees it was sunsetting the product. The original investors then bought the business back at roughly the price Meta had paid, and Manus resumed independent operation on 1 September.
Manus deleted user material created on or after 29 December 2025 as part of the separation, a cut-off that covers everything generated during Meta's ownership. The company said so itself when it resumed trading.
What The Block Established
The NDRC looked at where the technology and the people came from rather than where the holding company was registered, so offshore incorporation did not protect the deal. China had never before blocked a foreign takeover of an AI company.
Chinese authorities examined compliance with export controls and technology transfer rules in January, and accounts of the final reasoning diverge after that. TechCrunch attributed the order to concern about losing AI researchers to the West, while the news agency AFP reported analysts reading it as Beijing wanting more control over domestic technology.
State Council regulations on outbound investment took effect on 1 July 2026, in the middle of all this. They give Chinese authorities a clearer legal basis to review, restrict and unwind overseas transactions involving Chinese parties.
The Numbers Behind The Round
Manus published its own figure in December 2025, saying it had crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue eight months after launch, meaning subscriptions alone were worth that much over a year. Counting usage-based charges as well took the total above $125M. It reported 105 staff across Singapore, Tokyo and San Francisco at the time.
The Information reported in June that the annualised figure had reached about $500M, roughly five times the subscription figure published six months earlier. Reuters said it could not verify that reporting independently, and Manus has never confirmed it.
Meta described "millions of users and businesses worldwide" at the acquisition, and Manus publishes usage measures such as 147T tokens of text processed and 80M virtual computers created. No user count has ever been released by anyone.
The Product Shipped First
Manus 2.0 arrived on 28 September, ten days before the money. It added Cascade, a system that loads capabilities only when a task needs them, and Manus Studio, a desktop application covering documents, spreadsheets, slides, code, video editing and game building.
Cue, a separate app, gives a personal agent its own email address, phone number, digital wallet and computer, within spending limits the user sets. Software holding a wallet sits squarely inside the question of where an agent's authority ends.
Manus says version 2.0 used 23.2% fewer tokens, took 28.2% less time and cost 32% less to run than its predecessor, on one tested configuration. No independent benchmark has checked those figures.
Who It Is Selling Against
Meta built its own replacement after the deal collapsed, and its agent app Muse has passed ChatGPT on the United States App Store according to CNBC. The company is also running Muse Code against OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code.
Cursor, Lovable and Replit sell overlapping products for building software by description, and OpenAI charges $200 a month for its own agent. The consumer agent startup Nous Research raised $90M the day before the Manus announcement.
Manus builds on models made by others rather than training its own, including fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen. Benchmark's lawyers made that same point to the US Treasury in 2025, when the department asked whether a $75M investment fell under American rules on outbound investment in Chinese AI.
The Structure Is Still Moving
Manus says it is now forming teams to build products for the Chinese domestic market, reversing what Meta said would happen when it bought the company. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that the company is exploring a restructuring that could lead to a Hong Kong listing, with discussions at an early stage and no timetable set.
What the round settles is that investors will fund the company as a standalone business after a regulator took it out of a buyer's hands. What it leaves open is the structure Manus ends up with, and which market that structure allows it to serve.
