From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
Manus parent Butterfly Effect raised more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital with Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund participating, in its first round since Meta's acquisition collapsed.
Meta announced a roughly $2 billion purchase in December 2025; China's planning agency ordered it unwound on April 27, and Manus announced in August it would resume independent operations.
Manus reported $100 million in annual recurring revenue about eight months after its March 2025 launch; no valuation was disclosed for the new round.
Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta bought for about $2 billion before China forced Meta to give it back, has raised more than $500 million in fresh funding.
Its parent company, Butterfly Effect, confirmed the round in a WeChat post, with Boyu Capital and IDG Capital leading and existing backers Tencent, HSG (the firm formerly known as Sequoia China) and ZhenFund joining.
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The company did not say how it will spend the money, only that it plans to keep hiring in China and abroad. Butterfly Effect also did not disclose a valuation, but Bloomberg previously reported it was eyeing a $500 million raise at a $4 billion valuation, roughly double what Meta agreed to pay.
Manus makes AI agents, software that doesn't just answer questions like a chatbot but takes a goal and carries it out on its own, from booking trips to analyzing stocks. When it launched in March 2025, it sold as a Chinese rival to OpenAI's $200-a-month agent, open by invitation only.
Demand was frantic: invite codes were reportedly listed on a Chinese resale marketplace for as much as 10 million yuan, over $1.3 million. Under the hood, the company acknowledged it used Anthropic's Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen models alongside its own.
But still, these were times when agentic AI wasn’t really a big deal. Manus was experimenting with that use case before the AI behemoths started working on it.
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By December it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the yearly total of its subscriptions, about eight months after launch. Meta announced that same month that it would buy Manus for roughly $2 billion.