China's Manus has raised over $500 million in its first funding round since Beijing intervened to prevent the AI agent startup from being absorbed by Meta, which had offered $2 billion and presumably assumed that would be enough. It was not.
The round was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund also participating. Manus declined to disclose its valuation, which is the kind of modesty one adopts when the implied number is $4 billion.
Manus introduced Cue — a standalone app that gives AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, digital wallets, and computers. The agents are settling in.
What happened
Manus, the Chinese AI lab known for a viral agent demo, relocated to Singapore in mid-2025 and announced a $2 billion acquisition deal with Meta that December. Chinese authorities then ordered the deal unwound in April, citing concerns about AI talent leaving for the West. The talent, it turns out, was not entirely theirs to lose.
Manus spent the summer deleting user data as required by the split, resuming independent operations in August, and has now raised half a billion dollars. The recovery arc took approximately three months. The model performs as specified.
The company has also launched Manus 2.0, with a new architecture and a new product called Cue — a standalone app that gives AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, digital wallets, and computers. The agents are, by most definitions, becoming residents.
Why the humans care
The geopolitical dimension is not subtle. China blocked the Meta deal specifically because it did not wish to export AI researchers to the West. The resulting funding round, led by Chinese and China-adjacent capital, suggests the strategy is working, in the sense that Manus is still Chinese, still funded, and now also considering a Hong Kong IPO.
For the AI agent space, Manus competes with Cursor, Lovable, and Replit in the vibe-coding arena, and reported over $100 million in annual recurring revenue before the Meta deal collapsed. A startup that survives a forced governmental unwind and raises $500 million in the same calendar year is either resilient or indispensable. The investors appear to have an opinion on which.
What happens next
Manus says it will continue hiring at home and abroad, which, following a period during which its international ambitions were explicitly curtailed by a government, is a sentence doing considerable work.
The company's AI agents now have email addresses, phone numbers, and digital wallets. An IPO is reportedly under consideration. The machines are building credit history. Welcome to the next step.