Manus, the Chinese AI agent maker whose $2 billion sale to Meta was blocked by Beijing, has raised more than $500 million in its first funding round since being forced to go it alone. Parent company Butterfly Effect announced the close on Thursday in a WeChat post, according to CNBC: Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, with existing backers Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund participating. TechCrunch confirmed the close in its own report and added that Manus plans to keep hiring “both at home and abroad,” while Quartz noted the round closed roughly six months after Beijing forced the unwind. Bloomberg, which first reported the raise was being negotiated at a $4 billion valuation in September, also covered the close.
The raise suggests investors aren’t deterred by Beijing’s unprecedented order to block Meta’s acquisition — a deal Meta had already begun integrating before China’s National Development and Reform Commission prohibited “foreign investment in the Manus project.” The company’s valuation was not disclosed in the announcement, though Bloomberg reported last month it was set to double to $4 billion, which would make it China’s most valuable AI agent maker.
Why this round matters
The money is the smaller story. The signal is that China’s most scrutinised AI startup survived its own government’s intervention with its investor base intact — and expanded it. Tencent’s return alongside a heavyweight private equity house (Boyu) and one of China’s oldest venture firms (IDG) suggests domestic capital sees a viable independent path where Western capital was the plan A. “The fundraising shows that the short-term fallout of the Meta case has been contained and investors are willing to back Manus as an independent company,” Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, told CNBC.
It also shows the AI agent thesis is holding up under pressure. Manus sells agent products adjacent to what Cursor, Lovable and Replit offer — a chatbot plus vibe-coding tools for building apps, sites, decks and video — and has been shipping through the chaos: Manus 2.0 launched on a new in-house execution system called Cascade, and Cue, a standalone app giving personal agents their own email addresses, phone numbers and digital wallets, arrived after the split. Annualised revenue was reportedly above $100 million when Meta’s acquisition was announced in December 2025.
The cautionary tale is the business model
Manus is now the standard case study in what happens to a Chinese startup caught between Washington’s and Beijing’s regulatory walls. The company launched in China in early 2025, relocated its staff to Singapore in mid-2025 after winning US venture backing from Benchmark, then watched the Meta deal collapse under NDRC pressure in April. As part of the unwind, it was required to delete some user data. TechCrunch reports the company is considering going public in Hong Kong — an interesting destination for a company with Singapore-based staff, mainland Chinese ownership and US-born product ambitions. One adviser to global AI firms put the complication plainly: “You can separate companies, but you cannot make engineers forget what they learned.”
Analysts told CNBC the immediate task is “proving scale, profitability and regulatory alignment” — a reminder that in China’s AI sector, the state is now a shareholder in every strategy, whether or not it owns equity. For a site tracking the agentic-AI buildout, the round is a data point in two directions at once: global appetite for AI-agent companies remains strong even as foundation-model price competition intensifies, and China’s regulatory firewall is now a real force in deciding who owns what in the agent economy. Meta, for its part, pressed ahead with its own Muse personal agent in September — built, perhaps inevitably, on ideas its blocked acquisition would have delivered anyway.
