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Manus parent Butterfly Effect raises over $500M at reported $4B valuation

AI summary

Butterfly Effect, the parent company of AI agent startup Manus, said on October 8 that it raised more than $500 million in a new round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing backers Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund participating. It is the company's first raise since Beijing forced Meta to unwind its acquisition of Manus and the startup returned to independent operations; Chinese outlets call it the largest single round for a domestic agent-native startup. Bloomberg had reported the round would value the company at about $4 billion, a figure the company did not confirm; Manus released Manus 2.0 and a multi-agent group chat app called Cue on September 29, built on its in-house Cascade agent framework.

Why it matters: The round shows investors still concentrating on agent products that can actually execute and ship, giving Manus fresh capital as large labs fold agent features into their main products.

ManusButterfly EffectBoyu Capital

References 36氪 人工智能 · AIbase AI新闻 · CNBC Technology · DoNews · Techmeme · The Information · 品玩 实时要闻 · 开源中国 · 智东西

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Source text智东西 · 2 min read

智东西
作者 | 程茜
编辑 | 云鹏

智东西10月8日消息,刚刚,Manus母公司蝴蝶效应宣布近日已完成超5亿美元(约合人民币33.52亿元)新一轮融资。这是国内Agent原生创企获得的最大一笔融资。

本轮融资由博裕投资、IDG资本领投,老股东腾讯、红杉中国、真格基金继续加持。

超33亿元!Manus拿下国内Agent创企最大单笔融资,腾讯投了

今年9月,外媒彭博社就曾报道,蝴蝶效应计划以40亿美元(约合人民币268.3亿元)估值融资5亿美元(约合人民币33.5亿元),较此前20亿美元的估值,多了整整一倍,预计将会使Manus的母公司蝴蝶效应成为中国估值最高的AI Agent创企。

就在9月29日,Manus发布了Manus 2.0版本,以及多Agent群聊应用Cue。这是其9月1日正式恢复独立运营后的第一次大版本更新。

今年9月1日,Manus宣布正式恢复独立运营,Manus的三位联合创始人CEO肖弘、首席科学家季逸超、产品合伙人张涛将继续领导公司,并透露创新成果即将问世。

Manus 2.0采用自研Agent框架Cascade,依托这套框架,用户创建的项目从起步阶段就能保持轻量化,仅在任务有实际需求时,再调用对应的专业能力。

在一项测试配置中,与Manus之前的系统相比,Cascade的Token消耗减少23.2%,任务完成时间缩短28.2%,运行成本降低32%。这说明该架构下,任务完成的效果更好,损耗更少。

超33亿元!Manus拿下国内Agent创企最大单笔融资,腾讯投了

官宣推文中,蝴蝶效应称,其正在面向海内外招聘17个岗位。

去年12月30日至今,Manus从被Meta收购被叫停,再到如今恢复独立运营,融资、产品发布回归正轨。

结语:Manus要直面巨头与开源项目双重夹击

蝴蝶效应此番获得大额融资折射出全球资本对AI Agent赛道的押注重心正在发生转移,其更关注“能执行、可落地”的智能体产品入口。

从蝴蝶效应的投资方也可以看出,头部机构扎堆加注,也意味着具备全球化产品能力、已经跑通初步商业化的创业企业正在收获更高的估值溢价。

如今Agent领域的竞争愈发激烈,一边是OpenAI、Anthropic等海外巨头将Agent能力内置进主力产品,挤压初创公司的生存空间;另一边开源Agent项目持续迭代。如今Manus拿到资金后,既要在全球市场和巨头正面竞争,也要持续证明高估值对应的长期商业价值。

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How we got here

  1. ICANN's new gTLD round: OpenAI, Google and Meta all bid for .agentiThome 台湾 · Meta
  2. a16z: top 1% of paying users drive 19.5% of consumer AI revenue36氪 人工智能 · Meta
  3. Tencent open-sources EVIE-4.5B visual document retriever腾讯混元 · Hugging Face · Tencent
  4. Tencent's Knocket turns personal pages into chat-enabled AI business cards36氪 人工智能 · Tencent
  5. Flash-model test rerun: deliverable quality tracked the agent workspace, not the model36氪 人工智能 · Tencent
  6. From Siri to Muse: the personal assistant's 16-year relay36氪 人工智能 · Meta

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