Published: October 9, 2026 · Last updated: October 9, 2026
TL;DR: Manus, the Chinese AI agent startup that Meta once tried to buy a stake in, has closed more than $500 million in its first funding round since that deal fell through, with investors said to be valuing the company at close to $4 billion.
Eight months ago, Meta wanted a piece of Manus badly enough to sit down and negotiate for it. That deal, which would have handed the social media giant a stake in one of the buzziest AI agent startups to come out of China, never closed. Washington’s unease about a major American tech company taking a position in a Chinese AI firm reportedly sank it. Now Manus has done the next best thing to spite: it raised the money anyway, on its own terms.
TechCrunch reported this week that Manus has closed more than $500 million in its first funding round since the Meta split, with people familiar with the deal pegging the company’s new valuation at somewhere close to $4 billion. That is a serious number for a startup whose signature product, at its core, just takes instructions and goes and does the work rather than chatting about it.
Manus built its name in 2025 on exactly that distinction. Where a typical chatbot answers a question, Manus plans a sequence of steps, opens a browser, fills out forms, writes code, and reports back once the job is finished. It was one of the first agents to make that pitch convincingly enough to go viral outside China, which is precisely what caught Meta’s attention in the first place.
The Meta tie-up would have made sense on paper. Meta has been scrambling to catch up in agentic AI and has been willing to write enormous checks to do it. But a Chinese-founded AI company accepting investment from one of the most scrutinized companies in American tech was always going to draw a second look from regulators on both sides of the Pacific, and that is reportedly what happened here.
What is notable is how little the setback seems to have cost Manus. Going from a blocked acquisition to a $500 million round and a near-$4 billion valuation in a matter of months suggests investors were not waiting around to see whether the Meta deal would be revived. If anything, a clean break may have made Manus an easier pitch: no lingering ownership questions, no export-control headaches for the people writing the checks.
It also says something about where money is still flowing in AI right now. Even with plenty of nerves lately about stretched valuations across the sector, a company building autonomous agents, rather than another general-purpose chatbot, is still pulling in nine figures without much trouble.
Manus has not said publicly how it plans to spend the new capital, but the obvious answer is scale: more compute to run its agents, more engineers to expand what tasks the product can handle, and likely a push into markets outside China where English-language agent products are getting the most attention right now. The startup has already built partnerships with several enterprise customers interested in automating repetitive back-office work, the unglamorous kind of task that rarely makes headlines but accounts for a huge share of what companies actually pay software vendors to fix.
The fact that American money stayed mostly on the sidelines this time also fits a broader pattern emerging in 2026. Sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf, along with a mix of Asian and European investors, have become increasingly comfortable writing large checks into Chinese AI startups even as the geopolitical temperature around AI exports and chip access stays high. For founders in Manus’s position, that diversification of capital sources matters almost as much as the dollar total, since it reduces how exposed the company is to any single government’s shifting mood about Chinese tech investment.
Related: Nous Research just confirmed its own agent-focused raise and LMArena’s valuation is climbing just as fast.
Bottom Line: A blocked Meta deal did not slow Manus down, it just changed who gets to own the upside. Expect more Chinese AI startups to route around Western acquirers entirely and raise independently instead.
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