Butterfly Effect, the parent company of Manus, has completed a new funding round of more than $500 million, lifting its valuation to roughly $4 billion and setting a record for the largest single financing by a domestic agent-native startup.
The capital will support the company's expansion of general-purpose agent products and its return to the domestic market.
The round was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing shareholders Tencent (HKEX: 00700), Sequoia China and ZhenFund continuing to participate.
Bloomberg previously reported that Butterfly Effect planned to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation, double its previous $2 billion valuation.
On the same day the funding was announced, the company publicly opened 17 positions for recruitment at home and abroad, all based in Beijing.
The closing of this round comes just over a month after Butterfly Effect officially announced on September 1 that it had resumed independent operations.
Just days before the funding announcement, the company released Manus 2.0 and Cue, a multi-agent group chat application, marking its first major product update since resuming independent operations.
The concentrated bets from leading institutions reflect continued capital market attention to agent products that can execute and be deployed in practice, and provide ammunition for Butterfly Effect's next phase of product and commercialization competition.
First major product update after resuming independent operations
On September 29, Butterfly Effect released Manus 2.0 and Cue, a personal agent application.
Manus 2.0 adopts the self-developed agent framework Cascade, keeping the project lightweight from the outset and invoking specialized capabilities only when tasks actually require them.
Internal test data show that, compared with the previous system, Cascade reduced token consumption by 23.2%, shortened task completion time by 28.2% and lowered operating costs by 32%.
Cue targets personal life scenarios and shares infrastructure with Manus, supports mobile and desktop devices, and offers functions such as answering calls on the user's behalf, making payments within a user-set budget, and dividing tasks among group chat participants.
Manus 2.0 and Cue are currently launched overseas, while domestic products are still in preparation.
The company has announced that it is building a domestic product team and advancing cooperation with domestic model makers and ecosystem partners.
Sticking to the general-purpose agent positioning, with commercial value yet to be proven
Against the backdrop of increasingly intense external competition, Butterfly Effect still sticks to its general-purpose agent positioning.
CEO Xiao Hong compared this route to "selling computers": the same set of computing power can carry different needs such as work, creation and entertainment.
Under this logic, Manus targets work and creation scenarios, while Cue extends to personal affairs and daily collaboration, with both products sharing infrastructure.
However, the market has already shown disagreement over this positioning.
Some argue that as major model makers such as OpenAI and Anthropic build agent capabilities into their flagship products, the independent startup space for general-purpose agents is narrowing; open-source agent projects are also iterating continuously, creating a pincer attack.
Some early users also say that the initial wow factor brought by Manus is now hard to reproduce, and expectations for the product have risen accordingly.
At present, Manus 2.0 and Cue still need to prove their commercial value in specific tasks, including whether they can complete work reliably, allow users to revise smoothly and deliver results, and handle daily affairs within clearly authorized boundaries.
For the domestic market, the products also need to rebuild connections with local platforms and services.