On October 8, Butterfly Effect, the parent company of Manus, announced a new funding round of over US$500 million, covered by Cailianshe, WSJ Chinese and 36Kr. The round is led by Boyu Investments and IDG Capital, with returning backers Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund continuing to invest; reports suggest the valuation roughly doubled to about US$4 billion.

A Rollercoaster Year and a Half

Behind the number is the most dramatic arc in the agent space. In March 2025, Manus went viral as a general-purpose agent that decomposes tasks, calls tools and delivers results. That May it moved headquarters to Singapore; in July it gutted its China team (of ~120 staff, some 40 core engineers relocated). Then came the Meta acquisition, the deal blocked by regulators, and a shareholder buyback — per QbitAI, Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG bought the company back for around US$2 billion this summer, and on September 1 Manus regained independent operation with the founding team back at the helm. This round is its first capital answer since.

Multi-Source Facts at a Glance

· Amount: over US$500 million (Cailianshe, WSJ Chinese, RFI, 36Kr).

· Leads: Boyu Investments and IDG Capital; Tencent, Sequoia China, ZhenFund among returning investors (QbitAI, Securities Star).

· Beijing office reopened: openings grew from 11 before the National Day holiday to 17, spanning Agent Harness, agent evaluation and LLM algorithm roles (QbitAI).

· On September 28 it shipped Manus 2.0 and the personal assistant Cue for overseas users.

Why Beijing, and Why Now

Equity, market and talent drove the return: a white paper cited by QbitAI projects China's enterprise AI agent market at RMB 44.9 billion in 2026, exceeding RMB 332 billion by 2029, while Beijing concentrates model companies and AI engineering talent. The job board — from Agent Harness (execution framework) to evaluation, security and virtualization engineers — is clearly built for core R&D, not just go-to-market.

Still, the returning prodigal faces real doubts: last year's layoffs will make candidates ask how much core R&D the China team will own, and whether the home market is a long-term strategy or a tactical experiment. Retaining top talent will take more than compensation.

The Table Has Changed

The game Manus returns to is not the one it left. Overseas, OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code / Claude Cowork keep absorbing developer and knowledge-work scenarios, and Meta has revived itself with the personal agent Muse. At home, Qwen Office, Doubao Work, ZCode and Kimi Work claimed their positions during Manus's absence, while rapidly iterating domestic models slashed the capability threshold for building agents. The general agent has gone from scarcity to infrastructure; what counts now is execution stability, cost and ecosystem channels.

This matches NineZenith's conviction that agent value compounds on the enterprise side — on the TianXing platform, the engineering depth of multi-agent scheduling, evaluation and security governance decides whether agents move from demo to production. Manus's round two has only begun. (Information synthesized from QbitAI, Cailianshe, WSJ Chinese, 36Kr and other public reports)