AI agent developer Manus raises $500M+ at reported $4B valuation
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 2 sources
Manus just raised over $500M at a reported $4B valuation. The AI agent maker is now bigger than the drama around Meta’s failed buyout.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
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Manus, the Chinese startup behind the Manus AI agent, has pulled in more than $500 million in fresh funding. The company said Boyu Capital led the round, with Tencent and other investors joining in. Bloomberg had reported last month that the deal would value Manus at $4 billion, roughly twice the price Meta was said to have offered for it last December.
That Meta deal never happened. Chinese regulators blocked the acquisition in April, and Manus later said it would go back to operating on its own. Since then, the company has been busy tightening up the product instead of talking about takeover rumors.
The startup’s path to this point has been quick. It began in 2022 as Butterfly Effect Co. Ltd. and first shipped a browser extension that let users reach several AI models through one interface. In 2024, it raised $10 million and shifted focus toward the agent product that became Manus. The invite-only launch came last March, and videos of the agent handling multi-step tasks on users’ computers spread fast enough to catch Benchmark’s attention.
Benchmark invested $75 million in April 2025, around the same time Manus moved its headquarters to Singapore. A few days before the latest funding announcement, the company rolled out Manus 2.0, its first major update since the relaunch. The update adds a new harness for shaping the underlying models’ behavior, claims to cut token use by 23.2% on some tasks, and says it can speed processing by more than 28%. It also adds tools for generating clips and video games, plus Cloud Computer, which can host game backends, websites, and other long-running tasks even when a user’s machine is offline.
Manus also introduced Cue, which lets agents be equipped with things like an email account and a digital wallet. Users can create a message board for Cue-powered agents too, so they can work together on more complex jobs. The funding lands just a day after Nous Research said it raised $90 million for a competing consumer AI agent, while Meta has kept pushing its own agent work and recently saw its Muse app pass ChatGPT on the U.S. App Store.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of funding round that says less about one product than about the market’s appetite for agent theater. Everyone wants the machine that does the errands, but the real prize is still control: over models, over workflow, over the checkout page. Open beats closed when the product is useful, and closed wins when the logo is flashy enough.
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