Manus Raises $500 Million After Being Acquired, Un-Acquired, and Asked to Delete Some Homework

Butterfly Effect, the company behind the AI agent Manus, said on Thursday in a WeChat post that it has raised more than $500 million. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China) and ZhenFund participated, per TechCrunch and The Next Web.

It is the company’s first fundraise since its acquisition by Meta was unwound, and so it marks a milestone of a kind that few startups ever reach: being worth investing in again, after having already been bought.

The valuation was not disclosed. Bloomberg reported in September that the round was targeting about $4 billion, as The Next Web notes, and The CODEW’s funding roundup lists the figure simply as “Undisclosed.” So the company has, at minimum, five hundred million new dollars and one opinion about what it is worth, which it is keeping to itself. In the current market, that is practically modesty.

The backstory is the part that requires a whiteboard. Manus went viral in 2025 on the strength of a demo of its AI agent, then moved its staff to Singapore in mid-2025, per TechCrunch. In December 2025, Meta announced it would acquire the company for roughly $2 billion; TechCrunch reports Manus had annual recurring revenue above $100 million at the time.

Then the deal came undone. According to The Next Web, on April 27 China’s National Development and Reform Commission banned the acquisition and ordered it canceled; TechCrunch reports authorities cited concerns about losing AI talent abroad. In June, Meta cut Manus off from its internal data systems. Early investors then moved to buy the company back at the $2 billion valuation. In August, Manus said it would resume independent operations, and, per both outlets, it deleted some user data created on or after December 29, 2025 as part of the separation.

We’ll keep the regulatory piece exactly as reported, because that’s what it is. The corporate piece, however, has a certain sitcom quality. Most startups dream of an exit. Manus got one, and then got its entrance back. It is the only company we know of that has experienced the full startup lifecycle and then rewound to the middle to try a different ending.

So what will Manus do with the money? The company didn’t spell out the use of funds in the announcement covered by The Next Web. But TechCrunch describes the product line it’s building. Manus 2.0 introduced a new architecture built around a new harness. And there’s Cue, a standalone app that gives personal AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, digital wallets and computers. Agents can make payments within limits the user sets.

Read that again, slowly. Your AI agent will have its own phone number. It will have its own email address. It will have a wallet and a computer. At this rate, the median Cue agent will soon be better equipped than the median college freshman, and considerably more likely to answer its email.

The spending limits are the responsible part, and they’re worth pausing on. The question of how much autonomy to give an agent with a wallet is one the whole industry is working out in real time, mostly by finding out what happens when the answer is “too much.” A configurable cap is the digital equivalent of giving a teenager a debit card with a $40 limit. It won’t stop every bad decision, but it will keep them small.

TechCrunch also reports the company is considering an IPO in Hong Kong and plans to keep hiring in China and abroad. TechFlow’s summary of the announcement confirms the core facts: more than $500 million, led by Boyu and IDG, with Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund continuing to back the company.

Which brings us to the real lesson of Manus. In a market where every AI-agent startup’s pitch deck ends with a slide titled “Exit Strategy,” Manus has demonstrated that the exit is not, in fact, necessarily the end. It is possible to be bought for $2 billion, to be un-bought, to repurchase yourself at the same price, and then to raise half a billion dollars on top. Somewhere a corporate-development team is drawing this on a whiteboard, staring at the loop, and quietly updating its definition of “closing.”

For now, Manus is an independent company again, newly funded, building agents with phone numbers. If one of them calls you, be polite. It may have more runway than you do.

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