Manus (AI agent)
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Manus is a general-purpose autonomous AI agent developed by Butterfly Effect, a startup founded in China in 2022 and later headquartered in Singapore. Launched in an invitation-only preview on March 6, 2025, Manus is marketed as a "general AI agent" that executes multi-step tasks asynchronously in the cloud rather than answering single prompts, and it drew intense global attention within days of its debut. The product is built as an orchestration layer on top of existing frontier models, principally Anthropic's Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's open-source Qwen, rather than a wholly in-house foundation model. Butterfly Effect is also the company behind the Monica AI browser-assistant, and its founders include chief executive Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao (known as "Peak").[1][2][3][4]
In April 2025 Butterfly Effect raised roughly US$75 million in a round led by the venture firm Benchmark, valuing the company at about US$500 million. That investment, made into a Chinese-founded startup, later drew United States regulatory scrutiny, and in December 2025 Meta agreed to acquire Butterfly Effect in a deal reported at around US$2 billion. China's economic planning agency moved to block the acquisition in 2026, making Manus a focal point in the wider contest over cross-border artificial-intelligence investment.[5][6][7][8]
Butterfly Effect was founded in 2022 by Xiao Hong, a Chinese entrepreneur and software engineer who studied software engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. The company's first product, launched in 2023, was Monica, a browser extension that placed several commercial large language models behind a single interface for translation, summarization, and writing assistance. Monica was aimed primarily at users outside China and gave the company experience building consumer products on top of third-party models, an approach it carried over into Manus.[1][2][9]
The company's leadership combined product and research backgrounds. Xiao Hong served as chief executive and set strategy and product direction. Ji Yichao, who goes by "Peak," joined as co-founder and chief scientist; born in 1992 and raised partly in Colorado and Beijing, he had earlier founded Peak Labs (backed by ZhenFund and Sequoia China) and built the Magi search engine, and was named to Forbes China's 30 Under 35 lists. Zhang Tao, who had held product roles at companies including Tencent and ByteDance, led product.[1][2][9]
| Person | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Xiao Hong | Founder and chief executive | Software engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology; founder of Monica (2022) |
| Ji Yichao ("Peak") | Co-founder and chief scientist | Founder of Peak Labs and the Magi search engine; Forbes China 30 Under 35 |
| Zhang Tao | Product lead | Former product roles at Tencent, ByteDance, and others |
Manus launched in an invitation-only beta on March 6, 2025. A demonstration video showing the agent autonomously completing tasks such as resume screening and stock analysis drew more than one million views within about twenty hours, and the closed beta's waitlist climbed into the hundreds of thousands within days; the company has said more than two million people registered for access. A Butterfly Effect representative publicly conceded that the team had "completely underestimated" the level of public enthusiasm, noting the launch had carried essentially no marketing budget.[2][3][10]
The scarcity of invitation codes produced a brisk secondary market. Codes were resold on Chinese platforms such as Xianyu and on overseas resale sites, with reported prices ranging from a few thousand US dollars to, by some accounts, tens of thousands of yuan (figures cited in the range of ¥50,000 to ¥100,000, roughly US$7,000 to US$13,800 at the time). The Wall Street Journal reported that codes changed hands for more than US$1,000. The frenzy prompted widespread comparisons to DeepSeek, the Chinese model lab whose low-cost releases had caused a market shock weeks earlier.[3][10][11]
Before its breakout round, Butterfly Effect had raised earlier capital from Chinese investors. Reporting describes seed and early-stage backing from ZhenFund, and investment from HongShan (the firm formerly known as Sequoia China) and Tencent, with cumulative early funding described as somewhat north of US$10 million. According to 36Kr, the company turned down a roughly US$30 million acquisition approach from ByteDance in 2024, and its founders later declined offers of investment from several Chinese local governments out of concern that domestic state ties could invite scrutiny in Western markets.[1][5][6]
In April 2025, on the strength of the Manus launch, the company raised approximately US$75 million in a round led by Benchmark, valuing Butterfly Effect at about US$500 million, roughly a fivefold increase over its prior valuation. Bloomberg reported that the company planned to use the proceeds to expand into new markets including the United States, Japan, and the Middle East. Participants reported across sources included existing backers; some accounts also named Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen among investors.[5][6]
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead / notable investors | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early-stage (seed / Series A) | 2023-2024 | "north of" US$10M (cumulative, reported) | ZhenFund, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Tencent | Not disclosed |
| Series B | April 2025 | ~US$75M | Benchmark | ~US$500M |
Sources differ on the precise structure and timing of the earlier rounds. Some accounts place a roughly US$10 million Series A in 2023, while others describe a seed round in 2023 followed by a later Series A; the cumulative figure and the principal early investors (ZhenFund, HongShan, Tencent) are consistently reported.[1][5][6]
In mid-2025, following the Benchmark round, Butterfly Effect shifted its headquarters to Singapore and moved its international operating entity to a Singapore-registered company (Butterfly Effect Pte. Ltd.). As part of the restructuring, the company cut its mainland China team from roughly 120 staff to about 40 core technical employees, who were relocated to Singapore, while the remaining staff were laid off with reported severance packages. Manus also closed its Chinese-language social-media accounts, blocked mainland China IP addresses from its website, and shelved a planned China-specific version of the product.[12][13][14]
Commentators described the move as an instance of "Singapore washing," a label for Chinese-linked companies that reincorporate or relocate abroad to ease fundraising and reduce exposure to geopolitical risk. The relocation was widely read as a response to tightening United States rules on outbound investment in Chinese AI, semiconductor, and quantum-computing firms, and to the regulatory questions surrounding the Benchmark investment.[12][13][14]
Manus runs as an autonomous agent in a cloud sandbox. When given a task, it spins up a virtual machine equipped with tools such as a web browser, a code interpreter, office applications, and design engines, then plans and carries out the work over many steps without continuous human prompting. A panel sometimes called "Manus's Computer" lets users watch the agent's actions in real time and intervene if needed, and because tasks run asynchronously in the cloud, a user can close the session and return to a completed result later.[4][15]
Technically, Manus is an orchestration layer rather than a new foundation model. Multiple independent reports, and the company's own statements, describe it as combining existing and fine-tuned models, principally Anthropic's Claude (reported as Claude 3.5 Sonnet at launch) together with fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's open-source Qwen, coordinated by Manus's own planning, tool-use, and context-management software. Analysts have characterized the system's distinctive engineering as "context engineering," the management of what information the underlying models see at each step, layered over the third-party models. Because it depended on American models not readily available in China, Manus was designed from the outset for markets outside the mainland.[1][3][4][15]
This architecture drew a pointed contrast with DeepSeek. Whereas DeepSeek had trained and openly released its own models, Butterfly Effect did not develop foundation models in-house and did not open-source the underlying technology, which led many observers, including TechCrunch, to argue that Manus was not a comparable "DeepSeek moment" but rather a sophisticated wrapper and product layer over existing systems.[3][11]
At launch the company said Manus set state-of-the-art results on GAIA, a benchmark for general AI assistants developed by researchers at Meta AI, Hugging Face, and others that tests an agent's ability to reason, browse the web, and use tools on real-world tasks. Chief scientist Ji Yichao stated that Manus outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research on GAIA, and company-reported figures cited scores around 86.5% on the benchmark's easier (Level 1) tier and roughly 70% on a harder tier, ahead of the prior published state of the art. These results were self-reported and were not independently audited, a caveat noted by multiple outlets.[3][10][16]
Early hands-on coverage was a mix of genuine intrigue and skepticism. In a widely cited test, MIT Technology Review found Manus highly intuitive and useful for bounded analytical research, comparing its output to "the sorts of things a skilled human intern could do during a day of work," and noted a cost advantage of roughly US$2 per task against about US$20 for some competitors. The same review, however, reported frequent crashes, server-overload messages, trouble with captchas and paywalls, and a higher failure rate than OpenAI's ChatGPT Deep Research.[4]
TechCrunch's testing was harsher, documenting crashes on simple tasks (such as ordering food), failed flight and restaurant bookings that returned broken links, factual errors, and inconsistent citation of sources; a company spokesperson responded that the closed beta's main purpose was to "stress-test various parts of the system and identify issues." Manus was frequently compared with agentic competitors such as OpenAI's Operator and Deep Research and Google's Project Mariner, with proponents emphasizing that Manus aimed to run tasks fully autonomously rather than pausing for user approval at each step.[3][11]
On March 11, 2025, Manus announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba's Qwen team, saying the two sides would collaborate on Qwen's open-source models to bring the agent's capabilities to Chinese models and computing platforms, a deal seen as helping Manus manage its traffic surge while strengthening Alibaba against rivals. The China-specific version tied to that partnership was later shelved amid the company's relocation.[15][17]
Manus moved out of closed beta into paid subscriptions on March 31, 2025, with access through its website and a new iOS app. The initial plans were credit-based, charging for the compute consumed by agent tasks.[10][18]
| Plan (launch, March 2025) | Price | Monthly credits | Concurrent tasks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | US$39 / month | 3,900 | 2 |
| Pro | US$199 / month | 19,900 | 5 |
| Team | US$39 / seat / month | Per-seat allotment | 5-seat minimum |
The company later revised its pricing repeatedly as the product matured, adding a free tier with daily refreshing credits and restructuring its paid plans (for example, a lineup of lower-priced Pro tiers alongside a higher-priced power-user tier and team plans with administrative and single-sign-on features). Exact tiers and credit allotments have changed over time.[18][19]
By late 2025, Butterfly Effect reported rapid revenue growth, with an annualized run rate that reporting placed around US$90 million in August 2025 rising to roughly US$125 million by December, and a headcount of about 100 to 105 employees across Singapore, Tokyo, and San Francisco. The company was reported to be raising a new round at a valuation near US$2 billion when, on December 30, 2025, Meta announced it had agreed to acquire Butterfly Effect. The price was not officially disclosed; outlets including reporting cited by CNBC and others put the deal at around US$2 billion (some accounts as high as roughly US$3 billion), which would rank among Meta's largest acquisitions. Meta said it intended to keep operating and selling Manus and to integrate its technology into products such as Meta AI, while Manus said it would continue offering its own subscriptions and remain based in Singapore.[7][8][20]
The transaction quickly ran into Chinese regulatory resistance. United States Treasury scrutiny of the earlier Benchmark investment under the Outbound Investment Security Program (a regime requiring notification of certain US investments in AI and other sensitive technologies in "countries of concern") had already shadowed the company through 2025; Benchmark's outside counsel had argued the investment fell outside the rules because Manus did not train its own foundation models and Butterfly Effect was incorporated outside China. After the Meta deal was announced, Chinese authorities opened their own review. In 2026, China's National Development and Reform Commission acted to block the acquisition under the country's foreign-investment security-review mechanism, sometimes described as China's counterpart to the US CFIUS process, requiring the parties to unwind the transaction. The episode was widely covered as the first publicly confirmed use of that mechanism to stop a cross-border AI deal and as a test of the limits of relocating a Chinese-founded company abroad.[12][20][21][22]