36Kr republished an article from the WeChat account Xiutai analyzing Manus's "dependent innovation": the company does not train foundation models but calls external ones such as Anthropic's Claude and Alibaba's Qwen to build an agent that can open web pages, write code and deliver files. It launched in March 2025, passed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue eight months later, and in October 2026 raised more than $500 million at a valuation of about $4 billion, the article says. It argues that in the LLM era the lead time available to platform-dependent builders keeps shrinking, and that agents sit directly on model companies' main path, so heavier usage means bigger token bills — Ji Yichao's engineering notes put Manus's input-to-output token ratio at about 100 to 1. In October Manus released version 2.0 and Cue, which gives agents email accounts and digital wallets, an attempt to build user relationships that survive a change of underlying model.