Manus, the Chinese AI agent startup whose $2 billion sale to Meta was blocked by Beijing earlier this year, is in talks to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation now that it has resumed operating as an independent company. The round would roughly double the $2 billion mark set when early backers helped Manus buy back its shares from Meta, and it lands only weeks after the company confirmed its founding team is back in charge. Prospective investors include IDG Capital, Boyu Capital and battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, alongside existing backers Tencent, HSG and Zhenfund.
The company is also weighing a restructuring aimed at a Hong Kong IPO, a route that would give Chinese and regional institutional investors a cleaner path in than a US listing. That planning tracks with Manus's rapid geographic reshuffle over the past 18 months: the startup relocated its staff to Singapore in mid-2025, then announced the Meta deal that December, then unwound it under regulatory pressure this year.
Manus went viral last year on the strength of a demo showing its AI agent chaining together long tasks — browsing, coding, generating documents — with minimal user prompting. By the time the Meta transaction was announced, the company was pulling in more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a figure that placed it among the higher-revenue agent-native startups globally and helps explain both Meta's original interest and the valuation jump now on the table.
Key facts
- 01Manus is raising $500M at a $4B valuation, double the roughly $2B mark set when early backers helped it buy back shares from Meta.
- 02Beijing blocked Manus's $2B acquisition by Meta, citing potential violations of export controls and foreign investment rules.
- 03The startup was pulling in more than $100M in annual recurring revenue at the time of the December 2025 Meta deal.
- 04Prospective investors include IDG Capital, Boyu Capital, and CATL, alongside existing backers Tencent, HSG and Zhenfund.
- 05Manus is reportedly weighing a restructuring in preparation for a Hong Kong IPO.
The Meta deal fell apart because Beijing blocked it, citing potential violations of export controls and rules on foreign investment. The intervention reflected a broader concern in China about losing frontier AI talent and research to US companies — a concern that has hardened as Chinese labs try to close the model-capability gap with US frontier labs. For Manus, the collapse meant untangling a signed acquisition, negotiating a share buyback with its early investors, and physically separating its infrastructure from Meta's.
That separation was disruptive for users. In August, Manus told customers they would need to export and back up their own data because the company had to delete data generated after Meta's acquisition.
“comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions”— Manus, company notice to users
Manus said the deletion was necessary to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions. The company resumed independent operations this month and said its founding team will continue to lead it going forward.
The product itself sits in a crowded lane. Manus offers a chatbot, vibe-coding tools for building apps and websites, design and presentation generation, video generation, and a browser assistant — a feature set that overlaps meaningfully with OpenAI, Lovable and Replit. The pitch to investors is that a full-stack agent platform, priced for Chinese and Southeast Asian customers and legally structured to operate independently of any US parent, is a differentiated position rather than a me-too one.
The $4 billion target is not without risk. Doubling the buyback valuation in a matter of months requires investors to underwrite continued revenue growth from the $100M-plus ARR base, a smooth data and infrastructure migration off Meta's stack, and a regulatory environment in Beijing that has already shown it will intervene when it decides a deal cuts the wrong way. A Hong Kong listing timeline is also exposed to market conditions that have been uneven for tech IPOs.
For the broader AI market, the Manus round is a signal that Chinese AI startups blocked from US exits are finding domestic and regional capital willing to reprice them upward rather than downward. IDG, Boyu, CATL, Tencent and HSG writing a $500 million check at $4 billion — after the same cap table already absorbed the Meta unwind — suggests investors see the independent path as more valuable than the acquisition they lost, not less. If the Hong Kong listing materializes, Manus becomes a template for how AI-agent companies caught in US-China crosscurrents can still get to a liquidity event.
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