Manus, the creator of the eponymous artificial intelligence agent, has raised more than $500 million in funding.

The Chinese startup announced the round today. It said the private equity firm Boyu Capital led the investment with contributions from Tencent Holdings Ltd., one of China’s largest tech firms, and several others.

Bloomberg reported last month that the deal was expected to value Manus at $4 billion. That’s about double what Meta Platforms Inc. had reportedly offered for the company last December. The acquisition was scrapped this past April after Chinese regulators blocked it.

Manus launched as Butterfly Effect Co. Ltd. in 2022. The company’s first product was a browser extension that provided access to multiple AI models through a single interface. In 2024, it raised $10 million and refocused on developing the product that would eventually become the Manus agent.

The product launched last March through an invite-only program. Videos of the agent performing multistep tasks on users’ computers quickly went viral, which drew the attention of venture capital firm Benchmark. Manus raised $75 million from the firm in April 2025 and relocated its headquarters to Singapore.

After Meta’s attempted acquisition fell through earlier this year, Manus announced that it would resume operating as a standalone company. The software maker has spent the time since improving its product. Manus 2.0, the first major update to the agent since the company’s relaunch, rolled out a few days before today’s funding announcement.

Manus 2.0 features a new harness, a collection of software modules designed to customize the underlying LLMs’ behavior. It promises to reduce the agent’s token use by 23.2% across some tasks while speeding up processing by more than 28%.

It also ships with a tool that consumers can use to generate clips and video games. A second new feature, Cloud Computer, hosts AI-generated games’ backend code in a managed environment. Cloud Computing also lends itself to running other workloads. It can host websites and perform long-running tasks even when the user’s local machine is offline.

The third addition to Manus, Cue, makes it possible to equip AI agents with resources such as an email account and a digital wallet. Furthermore, users can create a message board for their Cue-powered agents. The agents can use it to collaborate on complex tasks.

Manus’ funding milestone comes a day after Nous Research Inc., a startup with a competing AI agent for consumers, raised $90 million. Meta, for its part, stepped up its in-house AI agent development efforts after the Manus deal fell apart. The effort produced an app called Muse that recently surpassed ChatGPT on the U.S. edition of the App Store. 

Image: Manus