Earlier this year, Manus was weeks away from becoming part of Meta. Now it’s trying to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation as a fully independent company again. That’s a remarkable turnaround for a startup that spent much of 2025 in regulatory limbo, and it says something real about how investors are sizing up the AI agent space right now.
According to TechCrunch, the funding round is drawing interest from IDG Capital, Boyu Capital, and battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, alongside existing backers Tencent, HSG, and Zhenfund. Manus is also said to be weighing a restructuring to set itself up for a Hong Kong IPO. None of this is confirmed by the company, which did not respond to requests for comment, but the list of potential investors is credible and the strategic direction tracks with where the company has been heading.
To understand why this matters, you need the backstory. Manus went viral in early 2025 after a demo of its AI agent impressed developers and drew comparisons to what OpenAI and Anthropic were building. The company relocated its team to Singapore mid-year, then announced a $2 billion acquisition deal with Meta that December, at a point when it was reportedly pulling in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That deal fell apart when Beijing blocked it, citing export control concerns and foreign investment rules. China’s anxiety about AI talent flowing to Western companies has been building for a while, and Manus became a visible casualty of that tension.
The unwinding process has been messy. Early investors helped the company buy back its shares at roughly a $2 billion valuation. In August, Manus told users they needed to export their own data because it had to delete everything generated after the Meta acquisition to meet regulatory requirements in certain regions. That’s the kind of operational disruption that kills momentum. So the fact that it’s now back, with its founding team intact and reportedly in serious fundraising conversations, is notable.
The $4 billion target is double the buyback valuation, which reflects either genuine growth in the business or the premium investors are willing to pay for AI agent platforms right now. Probably both. The AI agent category is genuinely heating up. OpenAI has Operator. Google has its own agent work underway. On the developer-facing side, Lovable and Replit are shipping fast. Manus competes directly with all of them, offering a chatbot, vibe-coding tools for building apps and websites, design and presentation generation, video creation, and a browser assistant.
What Manus has that some competitors don’t is brand recognition in Asian markets and a founding team that’s proven it can ship products people actually want to use. The viral moment in early 2025 wasn’t manufactured hype, it was real developer interest. But the company lost nearly a year to the Meta saga, and that time matters in a space where OpenAI and Google are not standing still.
Still, a clean balance sheet, renewed independence, and $500 million in fresh capital would put Manus in a strong position heading into 2026. The IPO ambition is worth watching too. A Hong Kong listing would be a strategic choice that keeps the company accessible to Chinese institutional investors while maintaining the global positioning it built with its Singapore base. Whether it gets there depends on execution from here, but the appetite is clearly there.
