Manus Raised More Than $500 Million Today, Five Months After Beijing Forced Meta to Give Up Its $2 Billion Stake

$500M+ (What Manus's parent actually confirmed Thursday -- not the $4B valuation, which remains unconfirmed) Manus's parent company, Butterfly Effect, announced Thursday it has raised more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing investors Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund also participating. It's the AI agent startup's first new funding since China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) ordered Meta to unwind its roughly $2 billion acquisition of the company in April -- five months after regulators barred two of Manus's own co-founders from leaving the country while that deal was under review. Manus didn't disclose what the round values the company at; Bloomberg reported in September that it would roughly double Manus's valuation to $4 billion.

The deal Manus is now a half-year removed from closed on Dec. 29, 2025, when Meta agreed to buy the Singapore-based startup for about $2 billion. Manus had been founded in China in 2022 by CEO Xiao Hong (referred to in some English-language coverage as Red Xiao), chief scientist Yichao Ji ("Peak" Ji), and Tao Zhang -- engineering talent and technology the NDRC later ruled couldn't be shielded from Chinese jurisdiction simply by relocating the company's headquarters to Singapore. In March, regulators summoned Xiao and Ji to Beijing and told them they could not leave the country during the review, though they remained free to travel domestically, the Financial Times reported. On April 27, the NDRC made its decision final: it would "prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project" and ordered the acquisition withdrawn entirely. Critics of the ruling call it "Singapore washing" enforcement -- the theory, as Quartz describes it, that offshore incorporation doesn't exempt a deal when the underlying technology and talent originated in China.

What changed financially while the deal unwound

Meta didn't unwind the deal immediately. TechCrunch reported in June that the company had only just begun operationally separating from Manus, cutting its staff off from internal systems nearly two months after the NDRC's order. Manus's own investors, led by Tencent, then moved to buy back Meta's stake, reportedly matching the original roughly $2 billion price. Manus said in August it would resume independent operations; this month the company said the restart was complete. (Two different dollar figures have circulated for the buyback itself -- a roughly $1 billion capital raise from outside investors in one May-dated report, and a valuation matched to Meta's full $2 billion purchase price in later reporting. Both can be true at once if the $1 billion only funded buying out Meta's specific stake while the deal stayed priced, on paper, at $2 billion -- the public record doesn't fully reconcile the two.) What the headline "independent again" framing undersells is how much the business itself changed in that window: the Information reported in June that Manus's annualized revenue run rate had climbed to somewhere between $400 million and $500 million -- four to five times the roughly $100 million run rate Manus carried when Meta's acquisition closed, achieved partly while still drawing on Meta's own traffic and advertising channels, per Quartz's reporting.

That revenue growth is the detail that makes today's $4 billion figure look more conservative than the "doubled valuation" framing suggests. A company whose revenue grew four-to-five-fold since its last pricing, and whose valuation only doubled, actually got cheaper on a revenue-multiple basis -- not more expensive. Meta's original deal valued Manus at roughly 20 times its $100 million run rate; a $4 billion valuation against a $400-500 million run rate works out to roughly 8-to-10 times revenue. That's this cycle's own arithmetic, not a reported figure -- Manus hasn't confirmed either the $4 billion valuation or a current revenue number, so the actual multiple could land anywhere the real numbers do.

What's still unresolved

Some of the regulatory story's open questions outlasted Thursday's funding news entirely. Neither Thursday's announcement, nor anything written since March, has said whether Xiao and Ji are still barred from leaving China. And the "Singapore washing" theory Beijing used to justify unwinding the deal has never been tested against a second company -- which means nobody yet knows whether resolving the Manus case this way is a one-off accommodation or the first application of a rule other Chinese-founded, offshore-relocated AI startups now have to plan around.

What Manus does next

The fundraising shows that the short-term fallout of the Meta case has been contained.

That's Dan Wang, China director at the Eurasia Group, on Thursday's raise. Han Lin, China country director at The Asia Group, framed what comes next more cautiously: "The immediate task for Manus now is proving scale, profitability and regulatory alignment." Manus has already shipped two post-split products -- Manus 2.0, built on a new execution system it calls Cascade, and Cue, a standalone personal-agent app that gives each AI agent its own email address, phone number and mobile wallet -- aimed at the same personal-AI-agent market Meta entered a month earlier with its own Muse product, the company Manus just spent five months extracting itself from. Whatever Manus is actually worth now, the company that spent nine months as a cautionary tale for cross-border AI acquisitions has also, in the same window, reportedly quadrupled its revenue and raised new money from some of China's largest technology investors. Both things are true at once, and neither one resolves the other.