Manus is lining up a $500 million raise that people familiar with the talks say could wrap soon. If it closes at those terms, the company would be valued at $4 billion, putting it at the top of China's AI agent pack and ahead of rival Evoken, which is fundraising at about $3 billion.
The financing remains in early stages, so details could shift, and the identities of prospective new investors have not surfaced. Representatives for Manus, Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund did not respond to requests for comment.
Investors circling the round are expressing a view that AI agents still have room to run, even as foundation models keep leaping ahead and pricing stays tight. It also reflects confidence that Manus is moving past the fallout from its brief $2 billion sale to Meta, a transaction Beijing forced to reverse in an unprecedented move.
Founded in China early last year, Manus moved staff to Singapore after winning support from Silicon Valley firm Benchmark. In December, Meta said it would acquire the startup after its annualized revenue topped $100 million. Chinese authorities later blocked the acquisition, citing fears of transferring valuable know-how to a geopolitical competitor. By May, Manus and Meta had finalized their operational separation and halted any sharing of data.
In the early days of this month, Manus announced it was once again operating independently, with the founding team still at the helm and creating generative AI agents for users around the world. In August, some users received notices that their information would be erased to satisfy regulatory rules.
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Before this round, Manus' founders and existing investors Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund bought back Meta's stake at an unchanged $2 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported in July. Tencent became the largest outside shareholder after taking over the stake that Benchmark originally held, and Benchmark exited with a multi-fold return. A prior attempt to bring fresh investors into that buyback was blocked by regulators, who treated the unwind as a strict return to the original setup.
Manus says it will keep building generative AI agents for a global audience under its original leadership. The company also informed select users in August that their information would be removed to adhere to regulatory demands. The journey doubles as a success roadmap for China-founded startups looking to scale abroad and a reminder of how tight the regulatory rope can be.
If this raise lands at $4 billion, Manus would cement its spot as China's most valuable AI agent maker and could ultimately pursue a Hong Kong listing alongside model labs such as Moonshot. The challenge is that agent specialists are competing with broad foundation models such as Moonshot's Kimi and Anthropic PBC's Claude, which are quickly getting good at the general desktop chores that agents handle. Manus refrains from building its base models starting from zero, leaving its edge concentrated in the agent layer.
For everyday investors, watch the signal here: capital flowing into focused AI agents despite faster, cheaper models suggests there is still appetite for software built on top of the big stacks.
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