Manus, the company behind the artificial intelligence agent of the same name, has closed a funding round of more than $500 million. The Chinese startup announced the raise on October 8, 2026. Private equity firm Boyu Capital led the round, with participation from Tencent Holdings Ltd. and several other investors.
Bloomberg reported last month that the deal was expected to value Manus at $4 billion. That figure is roughly twice what Meta Platforms Inc. had reportedly offered for the company last December. Chinese regulators blocked that acquisition this past April, and the deal was scrapped.
Manus launched in 2022 as Butterfly Effect Co. Ltd. Its first product was a browser extension that gave users access to multiple AI models through one interface. In 2024 the company raised $10 million and shifted its focus to developing the product that became the Manus agent.
The agent debuted last March through an invite-only program, and videos of it carrying out multistep tasks on users' computers spread quickly. That attention brought in venture capital firm Benchmark, which invested $75 million in April 2025. Manus then moved its headquarters to Singapore.
After Meta's attempted acquisition collapsed earlier this year, Manus said it would resume operating as a standalone company. The software maker has since concentrated on improving its product. Manus 2.0, the first major update to the agent since the relaunch, arrived a few days before the funding announcement.
Manus 2.0 introduces a new harness, a set of software modules built to customize how the underlying LLMs behave. The company says it cuts token use by 23.2% across some tasks while speeding up processing by more than 28%. The release also includes a tool for generating clips and video games, plus a feature called Cloud Computer that hosts AI-generated games' backend code in a managed environment and can run other workloads, including websites and long-running tasks when the user's local machine is offline.
A third addition, Cue, lets users equip AI agents with resources such as an email account and a digital wallet, and create a message board where Cue-powered agents can collaborate on complex tasks. The funding news follows Nous Research Inc.'s $90 million raise a day earlier for a competing consumer AI agent. Meta, meanwhile, increased its in-house AI agent work after the Manus deal fell apart, producing an app called Muse that recently surpassed ChatGPT on the U.S. edition of the App Store.
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