Chinese AI agent startup Manus is in talks to raise about $500 million at a $4 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported on September 18, 2026, less than three months after it walked away from a $2 billion acquisition by Meta Platforms that Beijing effectively blocked. The company, built by Butterfly Effect and now headquartered in Singapore, is also weighing a Hong Kong IPO to convert the wave of retail interest into permanent capital.
Who's Writing The Check
IDG Capital and Boyu Capital are anchoring the round, and Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) is in advanced talks to participate, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. Existing backers Tencent, HongShan (HSG) and ZhenFund have signaled they will follow on, and the new price would double the $2 billion buyback valuation that unwound the Meta deal in June.
From Meta Split To Comeback
Manus spent most of 2025 inside Meta after Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Labs unit paid roughly $2 billion for the team and IP. Chinese regulators refused to clear the transaction on data-sovereignty grounds, and by August 2026 the founders had bought back the company, relocated most staff to Singapore, and restored the standalone Manus product. Annualized recurring revenue crossed $100 million during the Meta year, and CEO Yichao "Peak" Ji has told investors it has grown since separation as enterprise customers signed multi-year contracts.
Why $4 Billion, And Why Now
The pricing lands Manus at the top tier of Chinese generative-AI unicorns, alongside Zhipu and Moonshot, and reflects a broader physical- and agentic-AI capital surge that also produced last week's $1.6 billion Bain Capital Ventures Fund XI. Bankers advising Manus argue that a listing in Hong Kong before mid-2027 would let backers exit into the same liquidity window that Ant Group, MiniMax and other Chinese AI names are targeting.
What It Means For The Agent Race
Manus competes head-to-head with OpenAI's Operator, Anthropic's Computer Use and Meta's newly-launched Muse for personal agents that book flights, run code and orchestrate SaaS. A $500 million war chest would fund the compute for its next-generation planner-executor model and multi-region sandbox infrastructure, both of which have been the bottlenecks investors flagged during due diligence.
Reporting based on coverage from Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Quartz and SiliconRepublic.