While Manus has not disclosed its post-funding valuation, it was previously reported that the organisation was aiming to double its valuation to $4bn.

Manus has raised more than $500m in a funding round, not long after Meta’s proposed $2bn-plus acquisition of the AI start-up fell through. The acquisition plans were abandoned after Chinese authorities raised concerns around national security and ordered Meta to unwind the deal. 

The recent funding round was ​co-led by Boyu Capital and IDG ​Capital, with existing investors Tencent, Sequoia ⁠China, now known as HSG and ZhenFund also participating. The announcement was made today (8 October) by China’s Butterfly Effect, which is Manus’s parent company. 

While Manus has not disclosed its post-funding valuation, it was previously reported that the organisation was aiming to double the valuation to $4bn via the financing round, in a move that would deem the company the country’s most valuable start-up in its field. 

Speaking to CNBC, Dan Wang, the China director at Eurasia Group, said: “The fundraising shows that the short-term fallout of the Meta case has been contained and investors are willing to back Manus as an independent company.”

According to Reuters, Manus said in August that it intends to resume operations as an independent company and will delete some of the user data as part of its separation from Meta. 

However, Matthias Hendrichs, a Singapore-based adviser for global AI firms, told CNBC that the close integration with Manus “does not disappear when the transaction is reversed”, as “you can separate companies, but you cannot make engineers forget what they learned”. 

In late September, Meta announced that it is hiring the CEO of MongoDB to lead the newly launched ‘Meta Enterprise Platform’. Meta described it as the next major pillar of its business and one aiming to “help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways”.

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