Butterfly Effect, the parent company of Chinese artificial-intelligence lab Manus, said on Thursday, October 8, 2026, in a WeChat post that it has raised more than $500 million, according to TechCrunch, TechNode and Nikkei Asia. It is the company’s first funding round since Chinese authorities ordered the unwind of the roughly $2 billion acquisition Meta had announced in December 2025.
Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the financing. Existing shareholders including Tencent, HSG — formerly known as Sequoia China — ZhenFund and others also participated. Manus did not disclose the round’s valuation. The previous month, according to TechCrunch, it was said to be in talks with investors to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation; that earlier figure has not been confirmed as the final price of the deal announced on October 8.
Manus went viral last year with a demo of its AI agent and relocated staff to Singapore in mid-2025 before announcing the Meta acquisition deal that December. At the time, according to TechCrunch’s report, the startup was pulling in more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In April 2026, Chinese authorities ordered the AI startup to unwind the deal amid intensifying worries in China over losing AI talent and researchers to the West.
In August, Manus resumed independent operations after the end of the Meta deal and said it was required to delete some user data as part of the split. It has also been reported to be considering a public listing in Hong Kong, according to the same TechCrunch report, though there is no official IPO timetable. The company did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about its valuation after the WeChat announcement.
Manus’s product sits in the same category as agent and “vibe coding” tools aimed at building apps, websites, designs, presentations and video. The company offers a chatbot and utilities so users can generate software and content with less friction. It recently launched Manus 2.0, which it describes as a new architecture with products and capabilities built around a new harness, and introduced Cue, a stand-alone app that gives personal AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, digital wallets and computers, within limits set by the user.
The round comes at a delicate moment for Chinese AI startups with international reach. The Meta unwind showed that Beijing can intervene when it judges a sale to compromise strategic capabilities or key talent. At the same time, local and regional funds — Boyu, IDG, Tencent, HSG, ZhenFund — remain willing to capitalize companies that show product and revenue traction, provided control stays within the perimeter authorities consider acceptable.
For Meta, the episode leaves a lesson about the geopolitical risk of cross-border artificial-intelligence acquisitions. Announcing a $2 billion purchase and being forced to unwind it months later carries integration, reputation and opportunity costs. For Manus, regaining independence after a period of corporate limbo and deleting user data under regulatory mandate adds operational friction, but also lets it present itself again as an autonomous player to Asian investors.
The fact that the exact valuation was not published leaves open comparisons with other agent startups. Prior talks around a $4 billion valuation, if close to the reality of this round, would place Manus among Asia’s highest-valued agent companies, though still below U.S. frontier closed-model labs. Without official figures, any ranking is provisional.
Using WeChat as the announcement channel is common in China’s tech ecosystem and limits the detail available to international audiences. TechCrunch, TechNode and Nikkei Asia reconstructed the story from that post and from previously reported background on the Meta deal, the unwind order and the August restart. Those reports do not break down how much each investor contributed or the governance rights attached.
Competition in software agents is intense. Companies such as Cursor, Lovable and Replit, cited by TechCrunch as category peers, compete for developers and for non-technical users who want to build products with natural language. Manus is betting on a broad package — chat, app generation, design, video and agents with their own digital identity via Cue — rather than a single niche. The new capital is meant to fund hiring at home and abroad, according to the announcement itself.
Open questions remain. Will a Hong Kong listing materialize, and on what timeline? How did the mandated user-data deletion affect retention and recurring revenue after the Meta split? Will Manus keep its operating base and talent pool split across China, Singapore and other markets? None of those answers appears conclusively in the WeChat post or in subsequent coverage.
What is clear is the political-business message: after being forced to unwind a sale to a major U.S. tech company, Manus has found Chinese and regional capital to continue on its own. Boyu and IDG lead; Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund reinforce. More than $500 million does not resolve the geopolitical dilemma of Chinese AI, but it does give Butterfly Effect room to hire, iterate on product and, if the market allows, prepare a listing.
For the sector, the Manus case compresses 2025 and 2026 into a single arc: product virality, foreign buyout offer, regulatory intervention, unwind, restart and a new domestic round. It is a pattern other Chinese startups with global traction will watch closely as they weigh overseas capital against domestic control. Meanwhile, international users and investors will have to judge Manus by its launches — 2.0 and Cue — and by the transparency it offers beyond WeChat posts and secondary press coverage.
