Chinese AI Startup Manus Secures $75M Funding Led by Benchmark, Valuation Soars to $500M

Chinese AI startup Manus reportedly gets funding from Benchmark at $500M valuation | TechCrunch

Chinese startup Manus AI, which works on building tools related to AI agents, has picked up $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a roughly $500 million valuation, according to Bloomberg. The company will use the money to expand to new markets, including the U.S., Japan, and the Middle East, Bloomberg noted, citing people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg's report suggests that the fresh round has quintupled the valuation of Manus, which previously raised somewhere north of $10 million from backers including Tencent and HSG (formerly Sequoia China). Manus came into the spotlight when the company launched a demo of a general AI agent that could complete various tasks in March. (In TechCrucnh's testing, it didn't work quite as well as advertised.) The company later launched paid subscription plans costing between $39 per month and $199 per month.

Chinese AI Startup Manus Scores Funding at $500 Million Value

The Chinese startup behind Manus AI secured a round of financing led by US venture firm Benchmark, scoring capital to explore the use of artificial intelligence agents to replace everyday tasks. The Silicon Valley investor was joined by several of the startup's existing backers in a $75 million funding that roughly quintupled its valuation to almost half a billion dollars, people familiar with the matter said. The company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, intends to use the capital to expand its service to other markets including the US, Japan and the Middle East, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

Benchmark joins $75m funding round in China's Manus AI - report

As the global race for agentic AI heats up, US venture capital company Benchmark is the latest to invest in China's Manus AI, says Bloomberg. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark has joined other investors in a new $75m funding round that would value the Chinese AI start-up at $500m. It comes at a time when the annual Stanford AI index last week pointed to rising quality and competition from China's AI players. Manus AI is aiming to replace everyday tasks with AI agents, a burgeoning part of the AI market. "While the US maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap," said the authors of this year's AI Index. "Performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024." Citing sources close to the deal, Bloomberg says Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus AI, will use the funds raised from Benchmark and its other existing investors for international expansion into the Middle East, Japan and the US. In March, Manus previewed its general AI Agent which it said could screen CVs, analyse stocks and create travel itineraries as well, if not better than OpenAI's Deep Research. Testing by TechCrunch at the time had less than perfect results, but other companies such as Baidu and ByteDance have all jumped on board with competing AI agents. Commentators immediately drew comparisons with the surprise quality of DeepSeek when the Chinese AI agent company released its model in January, as a signal that US AI leadership was under serious attack. Manus last month launched a $39/month subscription offering, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, although the company itself admits it is still in testing phase. Existing investors are reported to include Tencent Holdings, HSG (formerly Sequoia) and ZhenFund. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Benchmark joins US$75m funding round in China's Manus AI - report

As the global race for agentic AI heats up, US venture capital company Benchmark is the latest to invest in China's Manus AI, says Bloomberg Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark has joined other investors in a new US$75m funding round that would value the Chinese AI firms at US$500m. It comes at a time when the annual Standford AI index last week pointed to rising quality and competition from China's AI players. Manus AI is aiming to replace everyday tasks with AI agents, a burgeoning part of the AI market. "While the US maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap," said the authors of this year's AI Index. "Performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024." Citing sources close to the deal, Bloomberg says Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus AI, will use the funds raised from Benchmark and its other existing investors for international expansion into the Middle East, Japan and the US. In March, Manus had previewed its general AI Agent which it said could screen candidates CVs, analyses stocks and creates travel itineraries as well, if not better tahan OpenAI's Deep research. Testing by Techcrunch at the time had less than perfect results, but other companies like Baidu and ByteDance have all jumped on board with competing AI agents. Commentators immediately drew comparisons with the surprise quality of DeepSeek when the Chinese AI agent company released its model in January, as a signal that US AI leadership was under serious attack. Manus last month launched a US$39/month subscription offering, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, although the company itself admits it is still in testing phase. Existing investors are reported to include Tencent Holdings, HSG (formerly Sequoia) and ZhenFund. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Chinese startup behind Manus reportedly raises $75M in funding - SiliconANGLE

Chinese startup behind Manus reportedly raises $75M in funding Beijing-based startup Butterfly Effect, the developer of the highly publicized Manus artificial intelligence service, has reportedly raised $75 million in funding. Bloomberg today cited sources as saying that Benchmark led the investment. Butterfly Effect is now believed to be worth about $500 million. That's five times higher than the company's previous valuation, which it received after raising about $10 million from Tencent Holdings Ltd and HSG. Butterfly Effect's reported funding round comes less than two months after it started opening access to Manu. At the time, the company shared videos that showed the AI service performing complicated tasks such as website development and real-estate research. According to Butterfly Effect, Manus can also fulfill user requests that require interacting with multiple third-party applications. A few days after the service's debut, users started reporting that it struggles at some tasks. In one test, Manus crashed while trying to place a restaurant order. In other cases, the service fulfilled user requests only partially and skipped key steps. Manus is reportedly powered by multiple AI agents, large language models that are optimized to perform tasks with little to no human input. When a user sends the service a prompt, an orchestration engine breaks down the request into sub-steps. It then assigns each step to the most suitable AI agent. Recent reports indicate that Manus is powered by one of two LLMs from Anthropic PBC: Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The former model was touted as the industry's most capable coding model when it debuted last year. Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in turn, is an improved version that launched this February. Both LLMs support a feature called computer use. It allows them to complete multi-step tasks using external applications. To activate the feature, customers must provide the models with access to a Linux-based computer or virtual machine that has a browser installed. When Manus debuted last month, it was available for free through an invite-only early access program. Butterfly Effect's reported funding round hints at investor optimism about its ability to monetize the service. In late March, the company introduced two paid tiers of Manus priced at $39 and $199 per month, respectively. The more expensive plan allows users to have the service perform up to five tasks simultaneously. There's also a higher limit on the amount of compute infrastructure that Manus can use to process prompts.

Manus AI, Chinese startup, valuation reaches $500 million after funding round - Bloomberg By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Manus AI, a Chinese startup, has secured a round of funding led by US venture firm Benchmark, raising its valuation to around half a billion dollars, according to Bloomberg. The funding round, which also included several of the startup's existing investors, amounted to $75 million. The increased capital is set to be used by Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, to expand its services to other markets such as the US, Japan, and the Middle East. In March, Manus previewed a general AI agent that could perform tasks such as screening resumes, creating trip itineraries, and analyzing stocks in response to simple instructions. According to the company, their service performed better in some areas than Deep Research, another recently released agent by OpenAI. Following the release of Manus's AI agent, several other companies, including ByteDance Ltd. and Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:BIDU)., have launched their own AI platforms. The company's capabilities quickly gained popularity online, leading to comparisons between Manus and DeepSeek, another Chinese company that made waves in January with its effective yet low-cost AI model.