The parent company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, officially confirmed the substantial financing round through a statement published on WeChat. The investment was co-led by prominent venture and private equity firms Boyu Capital and IDG Capital. They were joined by a strong roster of existing backers, including tech conglomerate Tencent, HSG—the prominent venture capital firm formerly known as Sequoia China—and early-stage investor ZhenFund.
While Butterfly Effect did not publicly disclose the specific financial valuation attached to this new capital injection, Bloomberg previously reported that the company was targeting a $500 million raise at a lofty $4 billion valuation. If accurate, that figure would be roughly double the amount that Meta had originally agreed to pay for the startup before regulatory intervention derailed the multi-billion-dollar cross-border transaction.
The startup has not yet detailed how it intends to allocate the newly secured funds, noting broadly that it plans to continue aggressively hiring talent both within China and across international markets. This expansion strategy underscores the company’s determination to maintain its competitive edge in the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous artificial intelligence.
Manus first captured the tech world’s attention with its specialized approach to artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that are primarily designed to answer user queries or generate text based on prompts, Manus develops AI agents—sophisticated software systems capable of taking a high-level goal and executing multi-step tasks entirely on their own. These capabilities range from complex travel booking and logistics management to deep financial and stock market analysis.
When the product officially launched in March 2025, it was marketed as China’s answer to OpenAI’s expensive $200-a-month agent tool, operating initially as an exclusive service accessible only by invitation. The demand for early access was frantic, reflecting the immense market appetite for advanced agentic software. According to market reports at the time, rare invitation codes for the platform were listed on Chinese resale marketplaces for as much as 10 million yuan, translating to over $1.3 million. Underneath the surface, the company acknowledged that its underlying technology relied on a blend of Anthropic’s Claude, fine-tuned iterations of Alibaba’s Qwen models, and its own proprietary architectures.
At the time of its debut, the concept of agentic AI was still emerging, positioning Manus as an early pioneer exploring complex automated use cases well before Silicon Valley behemoths fully pivoted toward autonomous software agents.
As the startup grew, its operational footprint shifted. Manus relocated a significant portion of its core team to Singapore around the middle of 2025, scaling back the majority of its physical operations inside mainland China and carrying out a round of layoffs involving dozens of employees that July. Despite these structural shifts, commercial momentum remained strong. By December, roughly eight months after its initial public launch, the company achieved a major milestone by reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue from its subscription base. That same month, Meta announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Manus for approximately $2 billion, signaling a major push by Mark Zuckerberg’s company into the next generation of autonomous digital tools.
However, the technology landscape was shifting rapidly on multiple fronts. Attention within the developer community soon drifted toward OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent designed to run locally on a user’s own machine while accepting commands through mainstream messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. OpenClaw achieved viral status, collecting well over 100,000 GitHub stars—a key metric of developer interest and bookmarking—within just a few weeks of its release. The momentum behind open-source agents culminated when OpenAI hired OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to spearhead its corporate initiatives in personal AI agents.
Meanwhile, regulatory scrutiny over the Manus-Meta deal was intensifying in Beijing. In January, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced that it would closely review the proposed acquisition. By March, Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were reportedly summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving the country, according to reports from Reuters. The pressure reached a definitive climax on April 27, when the National Development and Reform Commission—China’s premier economic planning agency—formally ordered the transaction to be unwound. The agency stated that it would prohibit foreign investment in Manus in accordance with local laws and regulations, effectively terminating the cross-border acquisition.
Meta officially cut ties with the startup in June. By August, Manus announced that it would resume operating as an independent entity. As part of the separation process, the company deleted user data created on or after December 29, 2025, to cleanly sever its systems from Meta’s infrastructure.
Since returning to independence, the competitive environment has continued to shift. Meta launched its own dedicated coding agent, Muse Code, in August, entering a crowded market where industry observers noted it faced stiff competition from established alternatives like GitHub Copilot’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code. Manus, meanwhile, has continued to iterate on its product offerings, currently marketing Cue, an application that equips AI agents with their own dedicated phone numbers and digital wallets, with transaction capabilities strictly bounded by user-defined financial limits.
The turbulent trajectory of Manus unfolds against a backdrop of tightening regulatory oversight within China’s technology sector. In May, Beijing implemented stringent travel restrictions requiring senior artificial intelligence researchers and workers at prominent private firms, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, to secure official approval before traveling abroad. This policy reflects China’s growing sensitivity around protecting domestic technological advancements as its homegrown AI capabilities increasingly rival those of American competitors on the global stage.
Web3 & Decentralized Web
Web3 & Decentralized Web
Web3 & Decentralized Web
