The Pulse
Manus Raises More Than $500 Million in First Round Since Meta Exit
Butterfly Effect, the company behind the AI agent Manus, said on WeChat that it raised more than $500 million in a round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, its first financing since Beijing ordered Meta’s acquisition of the startup undone
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Butterfly Effect, the company behind the AI agent Manus, said in a post on its WeChat account on Thursday that it had recently raised more than $500 million in a new round. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the financing, and three existing shareholders, Tencent, HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China, and ZhenFund, invested again. The post also said Manus is still hiring, in China and abroad.
It is the company’s first financing since Beijing ordered Meta’s acquisition of the startup undone.
Butterfly Effect disclosed no valuation and no plan for the money, TNW reported, citing Yicai. In September, Bloomberg reported that Manus was nearing a $500 million raise at a valuation of about $4 billion, roughly twice the $2 billion Meta had agreed to pay.
A sale Beijing ordered unwound
Meta bought Manus in December 2025. By then the startup had shifted its head office and core team out of China to Singapore. Reuters described the purchase as a $2 billion-plus acquisition. In April, the security-review office of China’s state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, prohibited the deal and ordered both sides to call it off, TNW reported.
Reuters said the order came “amid tightening scrutiny of US investment in Chinese startups developing advanced AI technologies.” Manus’s early backers then set out to repurchase the company from Meta at the same $2 billion valuation, according to TNW.
User data deleted to complete the split
The separation also reached Manus’s users. In a note posted on August 11, the company said it would “soon return to operating as an independent company.” To comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, it said, data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025, the day Meta acquired Manus, would be deleted on August 23 and 24, Singapore time.
Affected users could back up their work until the morning of August 23 and restore it from August 25, losing access for the two days in between. Manus said it would not charge them during the backup period and would give “welcome back bonuses” once they restored their data.
“This is part of our separation from Meta; we must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world,” the company wrote in the note’s answers to users’ questions. Manus said the deletion was not the result of a data breach or security incident, and that its data is stored in the US and Singapore.
Founders back in charge
On September 1, Manus said it had formally resumed independent operations. The post asked users who had backed up data but not yet restored it to use the company’s restoration portal, and said there is no deadline to do so. Users who were not affected by the deletion did not need to take any action.
Manus has formally resumed independent operations. Our founding team will continue to lead the company, with a relentless commitment to product innovation and advancing general AI agents for our users worldwide.
Manus, in its September 1 post announcing the return to independent operations
In the same post, Manus called itself “an independent agent lab” and wrote that users would next see the product “act more proactively on your behalf.” Its general-purpose agents can run research and automation tasks with little human input, as Reuters and TNW describe them.
Revenue growth and a Hong Kong option
Manus’s revenue grew through the months of the Meta deal and its reversal. Reuters, citing a June report by The Information, put Manus’s annualized revenue run rate at about $500 million, against $100 million when Meta acquired it.
According to the same report, Manus was weighing a China-incorporated joint-venture structure, a step toward a possible listing in Hong Kong.