An agent built on other labs' models
Manus is an autonomous AI agent product made by Butterfly Effect, a company founded in 2022 by Xiao Hong, with Ji Yichao and Zhang Tao joining as co-founders of the Manus product itself. Ji had previously built the Mammoth Browser and founded Peak Labs. Manus positions the product as software that can take a task described in plain language, a resume screen or a piece of stock research, and carry it out across a browser and other tools rather than just answering a question. [2][3]
The company does not train its own foundation model. It builds the agent layer on top of models it licenses from elsewhere, reported to include Anthropic's Claude and, for a Chinese version that was ultimately shelved, Alibaba's Qwen. That makes Manus a bet on orchestration and product design rather than on frontier model research, the same wager OpenRouter and other routing and agent-tooling companies are making at the infrastructure layer. [3]
A fast launch and a faster pivot
Manus launched on March 6, 2025. Demand for the invitation-only product was reportedly heavy enough that invite codes traded on secondary markets for thousands of dollars. Funding followed the same trajectory: a 2023 seed round from ZhenFund, a Series A from Sequoia China and Tencent in November 2024, and an approximately $75 million Series B led by Benchmark in April 2025 that valued the company near $500 million. By December 2025 the company reported an annual revenue run rate of about $125 million, less than nine months after launch. [3][1]
Butterfly Effect moved its headquarters from Wuhan and Beijing to Singapore during 2025, laying off most of its China-based staff while keeping a smaller technical team. That relocation, and the reliance on non-Chinese models, is part of what let Meta agree to buy Manus for more than $2 billion at the end of 2025: Meta's terms reportedly required no continuing Chinese ownership and a wind-down of any Manus operations still in China. [3][4]
The deal Beijing would not allow
China's Ministry of Commerce, acting through the National Development and Reform Commission, ordered the acquisition unwound in April 2026, citing export control and technology transfer concerns, even though Manus itself had already moved its headquarters and most of its staff out of the country. Meta formally abandoned the transaction in June 2026. [4][5][3]
Atlas interpretation: Manus is a useful case for what jurisdiction over an AI company actually rests on. A Singapore address and a product built entirely on foreign models were not enough to put the deal outside Beijing's reach; regulators treated the founding team's origin and the technology's provenance as the thing that mattered, the same logic Washington applies from the other direction when it restricts chip exports. The company that tried hardest to leave the friction of being Chinese-founded still could not fully exit it. [4][3]
Sources
- Chinese AI agent Manus transcends chatbots, founder of start-up Butterfly Effect says
South China Morning Post · Mar 11, 2025
- Manus
Manus (Butterfly Effect) · Sep 9, 2026
- Manus (AI agent)
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026
- China blocks Meta's $2 billion takeover of AI startup Manus
CNBC · Apr 27, 2026
- China blocks Meta from acquiring AI startup Manus
NPR · Apr 27, 2026