Industry & Investment•16h AI-generated

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

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. What do you think?