Manus spent the spring watching Beijing tear up Meta’s roughly $2 billion acquisition. It just raised more than $500 million anyway.
Its parent company, Butterfly Effect, confirmed the round in a WeChat post. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the investment, with existing backers Tencent, HSG (the firm formerly known as Sequoia China) and ZhenFund joining.
Butterfly Effect didn’t say how the money gets spent, only that Manus plans to keep hiring in China and abroad. It also didn’t disclose a valuation, though Bloomberg previously said the company was eyeing a $500 million raise at a $4 billion valuation, roughly double what Meta agreed to pay.
When invite codes cost $1.3 million
Manus builds AI agents, software that doesn’t just answer questions like a chatbot. You hand it a goal, and it carries the thing 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 got 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. Timing helped too. Agentic AI wasn’t a big deal back then, and Manus was experimenting with that use case before the AI behemoths started working on it.
Then Beijing noticed
Around mid-2025, Manus moved its team to Singapore, shutting most of its China operations and laying off dozens of employees in July. By December it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the yearly total of its subscriptions, about eight months after launch.
Meta announced it would buy Manus for roughly $2 billion that same month.
Attention was already drifting elsewhere, though, to OpenClaw, an open-source agent that runs on your own machine and takes orders through apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. OpenClaw collected well over 100,000 GitHub stars, which are developer bookmarks, within weeks of going viral. OpenAI then hired OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to lead its push into personal agents.
How the deal fell apart
China’s commerce ministry said in January it would assess the Manus deal. By March, co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving the country, Reuters said.
On April 27, the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, ordered the deal withdrawn and said it would “prohibit foreign investment in Manus in accordance with laws and regulations.”
Meta cut ties in June. In August, Manus announced it would operate independently again, deleting some user data created on or after December 29, 2025, to separate its systems from Meta’s.
Cue, and a late rival
Meta launched its own coding agent, Muse Code, that same month, into a market where it felt late to the fight against Codex and Claude Code. Manus, for its part, now sells Cue, an app that gives agents their own phone numbers and digital wallets, with payments limited to a budget the user sets.
The squeeze extends past Manus. In May, China required some senior AI workers at private firms, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, to get approval before traveling abroad, as Chinese AI approaches levels of quality and relevance that can compete head to head against American companies.
Manus plans to keep hiring in China and abroad. The $500 million is secured. Whether every future trip out of the country gets cleared is a separate matter.
