From Meta's Wreckage to a $4 Billion Price Tag: Manus Weighs a Hong Kong IPO

Seven months ago, Manus was the deal Beijing killed. Now it is the deal Chinese capital is lining up to rebuild — at double the price.

According to a Wall Street Journal report published September 18, the Singapore-based, Chinese-founded AI agent startup is in discussions to raise roughly $500 million at a valuation of around $4 billion, and is weighing a restructuring exercise that would prepare the company for an initial public offering in Hong Kong. TechCrunch, citing the same reporting, confirmed that Manus has resumed fully independent operations as of this month, with its founding team continuing to lead the company.

A round with Beijing’s fingerprints

The investor list is a snapshot of where Chinese capital wants AI to go. Potential new investors in the round include IDG Capital, one of China’s oldest technology investors; Boyu Capital, the firm co-founded by Jiang Zhicheng; and — most strikingly — Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), the world’s largest EV battery maker, a company not previously known for AI venture bets. Existing backers Tencent, HongShan (Sequoia China), and ZhenFund are also said to be participating.

CATL’s involvement is the detail worth sitting with. A battery giant backing an agent startup is not diversification for its own sake — it is a wager that autonomous agents will become infrastructure for physical industry: supply chains, manufacturing lines, energy logistics. It also signals something about the round’s politics. A company of CATL’s centrality to China’s industrial policy does not casually attach its name to a firm still radioactive in Washington.

And the valuation itself is the headline. Manus’s last known mark was the roughly $2 billion that Meta agreed to pay in December 2025 — the price at which early investors and backers recently helped the company buy back its shares during the forced separation. The new round would double that, an outcome few would have predicted in April, when China’s regulators blocked the Meta acquisition outright, citing potential violations of export controls and foreign investment rules.

The company that got away — from everyone

The backstory has by now the quality of industry legend. Manus, founded in Beijing in 2022 under parent company Butterfly Effect, went viral in early 2025 with a demo of a general-purpose autonomous agent that didn’t just answer questions but executed multi-step work — browsing, coding, analyzing, delivering finished output from a persistent cloud environment. The waitlist swelled past two million. Annualized revenue was reported north of $100 million by the time Meta came calling.

Meta’s acquisition — its third-largest ever at over $2 billion — closed on January 8, 2026. It lasted less than four months. Chinese authorities, alarmed by the westward drain of AI talent and technology, used their foreign investment security review mechanism to veto the deal, an unprecedented application of that toolkit against a Western tech giant. By June, Meta had cut Manus off from its data infrastructure entirely. In August, Manus told users to export everything: data generated under Meta’s ownership would be deleted to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions.

That deletion deadline passed in late August. This month, the company declared independence — again — and promptly began shopping the round now making headlines.

Why the number moved from $2B to $4B

Skeptics will note the obvious: a $4 billion valuation for a company that was recently seized in a geopolitical crossfire, and whose products — a chatbot, vibe-coding tools, slide and video generation — overlap heavily with offerings from OpenAI, Lovable, and Replit, is an aggressive mark. The agent market it plays in is the most brutally contested category in consumer AI.

But three things work in Manus’s favor, and they explain the doubling.

First, scarcity. Beijing’s intervention made Manus the one thing Chinese capital prizes most: an AI success story that cannot be bought by an American rival. The export-control logic that killed the Meta deal made Manus, ironically, more valuable at home — a flag-planting asset in the agent race.

Second, the Hong Kong window is open. Chinese AI companies are actively testing the public markets, and a restructuring aimed at an HK listing would let Manus escape the private-market valuation freeze while giving mainland-adjacent investors the exit liquidity they cannot find in US markets. Moonshot AI, another prominent Chinese AI firm, confidentially filed for its own Hong Kong IPO earlier this month. A Manus float would land in a market suddenly hungry for exactly this story.

Third, the business survived the trauma. Revenue reportedly held through the unwind. The founding team, led by Xiao Hong, stayed. The product kept shipping. For a company that spent most of 2026 in regulatory surgery, being alive — with a nine-figure run rate and a known brand — is itself the bull case.

The uncomfortable read

There is a darker framing, and honest coverage should name it. Manus’s doubling is not primarily a statement about agent economics; it is a statement about decoupling. The same government that blocked Meta’s exit at $2 billion has presided over an environment in which the company’s value to Chinese investors roughly doubles the moment its American suitor is ejected. Whatever the technical merits of the round, the valuation is inseparable from the geopolitical fence now surrounding Chinese AI assets.

For Meta, the episode closes as an expensive lesson in regulatory risk: billions spent, talent scattered, nothing kept. For the industry, it is the cleanest demonstration yet that in the AI cold war, exit routes — like supply chains — are now chosen for you. Manus didn’t just survive the unwind. It discovered that being fought over is, in this market, a business model.

A Hong Kong IPO would make that model official. If the round closes near the reported terms, expect the listing chatter to dominate the next chapter of the agent race — on both sides of the Pacific.