Manus seeks $4B valuation in first round since Meta unwind
Two checks into the day and the money is talking again: one agent startup raising in Shanghai, one a month old in London — and Washington is putting the lab bosses at the head table.
Manus is set to close a $500 million round at a $4 billion valuation — its first raise since Beijing forced Meta to unwind its $2 billion buyout, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal would roughly double Manus's valuation and make it China's most valuable AI agent maker. Existing backers Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund are in; the new investors' identities were not disclosed. Manus, Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund did not respond to requests for comment, and Bloomberg notes the terms could still change.
The arc matters as much as the number. Meta agreed to buy Manus in December, after the startup cleared $100 million in annualized revenue. Beijing blocked the deal, the two sides finished an operational split in May, and in July the founders and existing backers bought Meta's stake back at the same $2 billion valuation — with Tencent picking up the shares Benchmark had held. Manus resumed independent operations earlier this month.
We covered the split when it landed in August — Manus returns to independent operation after Meta unwind. The bet here is that agent layers survive the foundation-model squeeze. Manus trains no base models of its own, and general desktop tasks — its original pitch — are now routine for Moonshot's Kimi and Anthropic's Claude. Manus is not alone in drawing fresh money: rival Evoken, the Chinese startup behind design agent Lovart, is raising at a $3 billion valuation.
A UK startup founded a month ago is in advanced talks to raise up to $700 million at a $3.7 billion valuation. Emulate, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is negotiating with investors ahead of the close, with Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners co-leading, according to the Financial Times. Neither the company nor the investors have commented publicly, and the round has not closed.
One month from incorporation to a near-$4 billion mark is the cleanest evidence yet that the top of this market prices people rather than shipped product. It also tells you what a DeepMind pedigree is worth outside the building: the same week Beijing unwinds one lab's geopolitical entanglement, London hands a blank-slate team a number most public AI companies took years to reach.
Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will attend President Trump's state dinner for Xi Jinping next week, with Apple's Tim Cook also expected, per CNBC and Bloomberg. Trump administration officials are privately discussing a sidelines meeting with the tech executives on AI and the risks that come with it, according to CNN's reporting — nothing is finalized or scheduled.
AI is now foreign policy, not a vertical inside it. The invite list puts OpenAI and Nvidia — normally on opposite sides of the regulation fight that has Altman and Amodei aligned against Huang and Zuckerberg — in the same room as the Chinese president, days after the US Treasury said Washington is open to discussing AI "shared risks" with Beijing. What the labs want out of it is unclear; what the White House wants is a deal.
What to watch: whether any of the three — Manus, Emulate, or the dinner — produces a number on the record. All three are still sourced to unnamed people.
Should lab CEOs be in the room when Washington and Beijing sit down on AI risk, or does that just make the companies the policy? Tell us in the comments.
