Manus, the AI startup once seen as a model for Chinese companies expanding globally, has raised $500 million in its first funding round since its deal with Meta collapsed. The company launched in China in early 2025, then relocated staff to Singapore after receiving backing from U.S. venture firm Benchmark. Meta announced an acquisition in December, but Chinese regulators later stepped in. The National Development and Reform Commission said it had decided to prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project.
Since the breakup, Manus has shipped Manus 2.0, built on a new in-house execution system called Cascade, and launched Cue, a standalone personal-agent app where each agent has its own email address, phone number, and mobile wallet. Meta, for its part, has continued with its own personal AI agent, Muse, which launched in early September and is modeled on the open-source AI agent OpenClaw.
Even with the companies separated, the episode remains a cautionary tale about the limits of unwinding a deal after integration has begun. As Matthias Hendrichs, a Singapore-based adviser to global AI firms, put it: "You can separate companies, but you cannot make engineers forget what they learned."