Manus parent Butterfly Effect raises $500M+ at $4B valuation, China's biggest agent startup round
智东西 · wechat · 2026-10-08
Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, closed a new funding round of over $500M (RMB 3.35B), led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund participating. It's the largest round for a China-based agent-native startup, implying a $4B valuation, double the previous $2B.
Key context:
- Manus 2.0 and the multi-agent group chat app Cue launched Sept 29, the first major release since the company resumed independent operations on Sept 1
- Manus 2.0's self-developed Cascade agent framework cuts token consumption by 23.2%, task completion time by 28.2%, and running costs by 32% in one test configuration
- The company is hiring for 17 roles; it previously had a Meta acquisition attempt halted last December
Manus now faces competition from OpenAI and Anthropic embedding agent capabilities into flagship products, plus open-source agent projects, and must justify its high valuation.
Related event: Manus maker Butterfly Effect raises over $500M at $4B valuation(4 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Blogger's take: building your own niche beats chasing trending AI topics — AlchainHust · 2026-10-08
- Chinese firms are gutting middle management as AI reshapes work, execs say — pstAsiatech · 2026-10-08
- Bezos predicts AI productivity could let Americans support families on 3-day work weeks — Polymarket · 2026-10-08
- How to become a Marketing Engineer in 90 days as AI agents reshape marketing — VibeMarketer_ · 2026-10-08
- Dev: every Japanese team I work with builds its own LLM inference engine — lxfater · 2026-10-08
- Cohere opens its first Ottawa office, doubling down on Canadian roots — cohere · 2026-10-08