While Beijing was unwinding Meta's roughly $2 billion purchase of Manus this spring, the AI agent startup secured a round of more than $500 million, its parent company Butterfly Effect announced in a WeChat post. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the investment, with previous backers Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG returning. No breakdown of how the capital will be spent was offered, beyond Manus' intention to keep recruiting staff in China and overseas. A valuation was left out as well, although Bloomberg has previously reported that the company was chasing $500 million at a $4 billion valuation — roughly twice the sum Meta had agreed to pay.
Manus offers an AI agent that takes a goal and executes the whole thing on its own, rather than merely answering questions the way a chatbot does, whether that means booking trips or digging through stocks. At its March 2025 launch, Manus positioned itself as a Chinese rival to OpenAI's $200-a-month agent, open by invitation only. Interest quickly turned frenzied, with invite codes reportedly flipping on a Chinese resale marketplace for as much as 10 million yuan — upwards of $1.3 million. The company has admitted that underneath, it leaned on Anthropic's Claude plus fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen models alongside its own technology.
In mid-2025, the startup relocated its team to Singapore, winding down most of its China operations and cutting dozens of staff in July. By December it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue roughly eight months after launch. That same month, Meta said it would acquire Manus for approximately $2 billion. By June, Meta had severed ties. August brought word from Manus that it would return to independent operation, deleting some user data generated on or after December 29, 2025, in order to untangle its systems from Meta's. Manus is now selling Cue — an app that gives agents their own phone numbers and digital wallets, with spending capped at a budget chosen by the user.