Manus raised over $500m in first round since Meta breakup

Funding round

Existing shareholders Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund provided follow-on investment, Butterfly Effect said in a WeChat post. The parent company said Manus plans to keep hiring in China and abroad but did not say how it will spend the money or disclose a post-funding valuation.

Bloomberg reported last month that the round would value Manus at about $4 billion, which would make it the country's most valuable AI agent maker. That would equal about 40 times the $100 million in annual recurring revenue Manus said it passed in December. The round is more than six times the $75 million Manus raised in a Benchmark-led round in April last year.

Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, said the raise shows the short-term fallout of the Meta case has been contained and that investors are willing to back Manus as an independent company. Han Lin, China country director at The Asia Group, said the immediate task for Manus is proving scale, profitability and regulatory alignment.

Meta unwind

China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the parties to withdraw the $2 billion transaction on 27 April 2026 and said it would prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project. The one-line statement did not name Meta and gave no reasons. Meta said the transaction "complied fully with applicable law" and that it anticipated "an appropriate resolution to the inquiry".

Meta later cut Manus off from its internal systems, Bloomberg reported, and TechCrunch reported the companies had halted data sharing. In August Manus said some users will need to back up data generated on or after 29 December 2025, the date the Meta deal was announced, to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world, CNBC reported. Benchmark had already received its proceeds, while Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund said they would cooperate with the unwind, the Wall Street Journal reported.

After the split

Manus said earlier in October that it had resumed independent operations after its split from Meta. Since the split, it has launched Manus 2.0, built on a new in-house execution system called Cascade, and Cue, a standalone personal-agent app in which each agent has its own email address, phone number and mobile wallet, CNBC reported.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, told NPR that the ban showed China was willing to play hardball over AI talent and capabilities, which the country views as a core national security asset, and could deter similar acquisition plans by U.S. tech giants.