While Beijing was unwinding Meta’s roughly $2 billion purchase of Manus this spring, the AI agent startup went out and secured a round of more than $500 million anyway.
Butterfly Effect, the startup’s parent company, announced the funding in a WeChat post. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the investment, with previous backers — Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG (the firm that used to be Sequoia China) — coming back in.
No breakdown of how the capital will be spent was offered, beyond Manus’ intention to keep recruiting staff in China and overseas. A valuation was left out as well, although Bloomberg has previously reported that the company was chasing $500 million at a $4 billion valuation — roughly twice the sum Meta had agreed to pay.
The days when an invite code went for $1.3 million
The company’s product is an AI agent: rather than merely answering questions the way a chatbot does, it takes a goal you give it and executes the whole thing on its own, whether that means booking trips or digging through stocks.
At its March 2025 launch, Manus positioned itself as a Chinese rival to OpenAI's $200-a-month agent, open by invitation only. Interest quickly turned frenzied, with invite codes reportedly flipping on a Chinese resale marketplace for as much as 10 million yuan — upwards of $1.3 million.
The company has admitted that underneath, it leaned on Anthropic’s Claude plus fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen models alongside its own technology. Timing worked in its favor too: agentic AI was not a headline act back then, and Manus was already toying with the use case before the AI giants started building in that direction.
Then Beijing stepped in
In mid-2025, the startup relocated its team to Singapore, winding down most of its China operations and cutting dozens of staff in July. By December it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue — the yearly value of its subscriptions — roughly eight months after launch.
That same month, Meta said it would acquire Manus for approximately $2 billion.
The spotlight was already drifting elsewhere, though, toward OpenClaw — an open-source agent that runs on your own machine and takes instructions through apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Within weeks of going viral, OpenClaw had racked up well over 100,000 GitHub stars, which are developer bookmarks. OpenAI then brought in OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to spearhead its push into personal agents.
How everything unraveled
In January, China’s commerce ministry announced it would assess the Manus transaction. Reuters reported that by March, co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been called to Beijing and placed under a travel ban.
Then on April 27, the National Development and Reform Commission — China’s top economic planning agency — instructed that the deal be withdrawn, adding it would "prohibit foreign investment in Manus in accordance with laws and regulations."
By June, Meta had severed ties. August brought word from Manus that it would return to independent operation, deleting some user data generated on or after December 29, 2025, in order to untangle its systems from Meta’s.
Cue, and a rival showing up late
That same month, Meta rolled out its own coding agent, Muse Code, stepping into a market where it lagged behind Codex and Claude Code. Manus, for its part, is now selling Cue — an app that gives agents their own phone numbers and digital wallets, with spending capped at a budget chosen by the user.
Manus is not the only one feeling the squeeze. Come May, China began requiring certain senior AI staff at private companies — among them Alibaba and DeepSeek — to secure approval before traveling abroad, as Chinese AI edges toward quality and relevance that can compete head to head with American firms.
Hiring will continue in China and beyond, and the $500 million is in the bank. Whether every future trip out of the country gets the green light is a separate question entirely.