AI Startup Manus Raises $500 Million After China Nixed Meta’s $2 Billion Acquisition

Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta purchased for about $2 billion earlier than China compelled Meta to provide it again, has raised more than $500 million in contemporary funding.

Its father or mother firm, Butterfly Impact, confirmed the spherical in a WeChat submit, with Boyu Capital and IDG Capital main and present backers Tencent, HSG (the agency previously often known as Sequoia China) and ZhenFund becoming a member of.

The corporate didn’t say the way it will spend the cash, solely that it plans to maintain hiring in China and overseas. Butterfly Impact additionally didn’t disclose a valuation, however Bloomberg previously reported it was eyeing a $500 million elevate at a $4 billion valuation, roughly double what Meta agreed to pay.

Manus makes AI brokers, software program that does not simply reply questions like a chatbot however takes a aim and carries it out by itself, from reserving journeys to analyzing shares. When it launched in March 2025, it offered as a Chinese language rival to OpenAI’s $200-a-month agent, open by invitation solely.

Demand was frantic: invite codes had been reportedly listed on a Chinese language resale market for as a lot as 10 million yuan, over $1.3 million. Underneath the hood, the corporate acknowledged it used Anthropic’s Claude and fine-tuned variations of Alibaba’s Qwen fashions alongside its personal.

However nonetheless, these had been instances when agentic AI wasn’t actually a giant deal. Manus was experimenting with that use case earlier than the AI behemoths began engaged on it.

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Manus moved its workforce to Singapore round mid-2025, shutting most of its China operations and shedding dozens of staff in July.

By December it had reached $100 million in annual recurring income, the yearly whole of its subscriptions, about eight months after launch. Meta announced that very same month that it could purchase Manus for roughly $2 billion.

Consideration, in the meantime, drifted to OpenClaw, an open-source agent that runs by yourself machine and takes orders by apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. OpenClaw collected nicely over 100,000 GitHub stars, that are developer bookmarks, inside weeks of going viral.

OpenAI then hired OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to steer its push into private brokers.

China’s commerce ministry stated in January it could assess the Manus deal, and by March co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving the nation, per Reuters. On April 27, the Nationwide Improvement and Reform Fee, China’s prime financial planning company, ordered the deal withdrawn and stated it could “prohibit overseas funding in Manus in accordance with legal guidelines and laws.”

Meta lower ties in June. In August, Manus introduced it could function independently once more, deleting some consumer knowledge created on or after December 29, 2025, to separate its programs from Meta’s.

Meta’s personal coding agent, Muse Code, launched that very same month right into a market the place it felt late to the fight towards Codex and Claude Code. Manus, for its half, now sells Cue, an app that provides brokers their very own cellphone numbers and digital wallets, with funds restricted to a finances the consumer units.

The Manus case sits inside a wider tightening in Beijing: in Could, China required some senior AI staff at non-public companies, together with Alibaba and DeepSeek, to get approval earlier than touring overseas, as Chinese language AI approaches ranges of high quality and relevance that may compete face to face towards American corporations.