Manas raises $500 million in first funding round after Meta dissolution

AI agent startup Manus has raised over $500 million in its first funding round. meta was forced to abandon its bid to acquire the company.

Manas’ parent company Butterfly Effect announced Thursday that the round was led by private equity firm Boyu Capital and venture investor IDG Capital, with additional investment from existing shareholders. tencentHSG, ZhenFund.

The company has not disclosed its valuation after raising funds. Bloomberg reported last month that Manas is set to double its valuation to $4 billion with the latest funding round, making it the country’s most valuable AI agent maker.

The increase suggests investors are not daunted by the Chinese government’s unprecedented order to block Meta’s short-term $2 billion takeover. Meta was trying to integrate Manus’ team and technology into its own systems when authorities blocked the deal. It also shows that demand for AI agent startups is sustained despite rapid improvements in the underlying underlying models and increasing price competition.

“This funding shows that the short-term fallout from the Meta lawsuit has been contained and investors are willing to support Manas as an independent company,” said Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, also pointing to renewed confidence in the AI ​​agent’s commercial potential.

Manas may eventually seek to go public, but analysts say the more pressing challenge will be to prove profitability and revamp its business and ownership structure to meet Chinese government regulatory requirements.

“The immediate challenge for Manus is to prove its scale, profitability and regulatory alignment,” said Han Lin, China director at Asia Group.

Earlier this month, Manas said he would restart his independent business after splitting from Meta, and that the founding team would continue to drive generative AI agents for users around the world.

Manas, once seen as a blueprint for Chinese startups looking to expand globally, has become a wake-up call for companies caught in a bind between regulators in Beijing and Washington.

The company started in China in early 2025 and later moved its staff to Singapore with support from US venture firm Benchmark. Meta announced the acquisition in December. Chinese regulators later blocked it. The National Development and Reform Commission announced that it had decided to “prohibit foreign investment in the Manus Project.” By that time, Meta had begun integrating Manus’ team and technology into its own team.

After the split, the AI ​​startup announced Manus 2.0, built on a new in-house execution system called Cascade. We also launched Cue, a standalone personal agent app where each agent has their own email address, phone number, and mobile wallet.

Meta continues to develop its own personal AI agent, releasing the Muse agent modeled after the open source AI agent OpenClaw in early September.

The “tight integration” with Manas “will not disappear even if the deal is withdrawn,” said Matthias Hendricks, a Singapore-based advisor to the global AI company.

“You can separate companies, but you can’t make engineers forget what they learned.”