Manus Secures $500M+ Funding After Meta Deal Collapse

Chinese AI lab Manus, operated by parent company Butterfly Effect, has closed a financing round exceeding $500 million, its first since the aborted $2 billion acquisition by Meta.

Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, with participation from existing backers Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China), ZhenFund and others. Manus did not disclose a valuation, though earlier talks suggested a $4 billion price tag.

The startup first captured attention with a viral demo of its autonomous AI agent, moved its team to Singapore in mid‑2025, and announced the Meta deal in December of that year. Chinese regulators ordered the transaction unwound in April 2026, requiring Manus to delete certain user data before resuming independent operations in August.

Manus offers a chatbot, “vibe‑coding” tools for building apps, sites, designs and video, and recently launched Manus 2.0 with a new architecture. Its standalone Cue app equips personal agents with email, phone numbers, digital wallets and dedicated compute resources, enabling them to communicate, transact and execute tasks across services.

Why it matters for GPU / AI infrastructure

The fresh capital will accelerate the scaling of agent‑centric workloads that rely on large‑scale model inference and real‑time interaction. This drives demand for high‑performance GPU clusters, low‑latency networking and flexible cloud‑native orchestration—core capabilities that platforms like AiGpu provide to AI‑first companies.

Manus is also reportedly exploring a Hong Kong listing and plans to expand hiring globally, signaling sustained growth in the autonomous‑agent market.