Eurasia Group’s Dan Wang noted that the fundraising is evidence of investors’ continued interest in backing Manus, despite the fall out from the Meta incident.
It has been confirmed that Manus has raised funds of more than $500m, not long after Meta’s proposed $2bn-plus acquisition of the AI start-up fell through. The plans were abandoned after Chinese authorities raised concerns around national security.
The recent funding round was ?co-led by Boyu Capital and IDG ?Capital, with existing investors Tencent, Sequoia ?China and ZhenFund also participating. The announcement was made today (8 October) by Butterfly Effect, which is Manus’ parent company.
While Manus has not disclosed its post-funding valuation, it was previously reported that the organisation was aiming to double the valuation to $4bn via the financing round, in a move that would deem the company the country’s most valuable maker of AI agents.
According to Dan Wang, the China director at Eurasia Group, the recent investment is evidence of investors’ continued interest in funding organisations operating within the AI space, despite challenges and roadblocks.
He said, “The fundraising shows that the short-term fallout of the Meta case has been contained and investors are willing to back Manus as an independent company.”
According to Reuters, Manus said in August it intends to resume operations as an independent company and will delete some of the user data pertaining to its separation from Meta.
However, Matthias Hendrichs, a Singapore-based adviser for global AI firms, previously said that the close integration with Manus “does not disappear when the transaction is reversed, as “you can separate companies, but you cannot make engineers forget what they learned”.
In late September, Meta announced that it is hiring the CEO of MongoDB to lead the newly launched ‘Meta Enterprise Platform’. Meta described it as the next major pillar of its business and one aiming to “help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways”.
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