Organisation · company · SG

Manus

A general-purpose autonomous agent that plans and executes multi-step tasks end to end, built by Butterfly Effect (maker of the Monica assistant).

1 entry · 27 April 2026

Manus is a general-purpose autonomous AI agent, launched in March 2025 by Butterfly Effect, the startup behind the Monica assistant that was founded in 2022 and later moved its headquarters from China to Singapore. Where a chatbot answers turn by turn, Manus is designed to take a single goal and carry out the intermediate steps itself — browsing the web, running code and producing files — to deliver a finished result; demonstrations drew heavy attention and a large waitlist, while reviewers reported mixed reliability. Backed by Benchmark among others at a reported valuation near $500m in 2025, it was acquired that December by Meta for a reported sum above $2 billion — a deal China's regulators then blocked and ordered unwound in April 2026, the first use of the country's foreign-investment security review.

Category
Agents & applied AI
Founded
2022
HQ
Singapore, SG
Funding
~$500m valuation (2025, round led by Benchmark)
Key people
Xiao Hong, Yichao Ji

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  1. China blocks and orders Meta to unwind its Manus acquisition

    Beijing invoked its foreign-investment security review for the first time to reverse a completed $2bn-plus deal, months after Meta had folded Manus's team into its Singapore office.

    Money & business · Government & policy · Labs & people