The original Chinese backers of artificial intelligence (AI) startup Manus are planning to buy the company back from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, at the same $2 billion valuation it was purchased for, a report has claimed. According to The Information (via news agency Reuters), the reversal comes just months after the Chinese government ordered Meta to completely unwind its acquisition of Manus. The order highlighted Beijing’s tightening scrutiny and aggressive pushback against US investments in Chinese startups developing advanced AI technologies.
Who are Manus’ early investors
The planned buyback involves Manus’s earliest high-profile investors, including HSG, ZhenFund and Chinese tech giant Tencent. To fund the move, HSG and ZhenFund are reportedly considering raising fresh capital to fully purchase Meta’s equity position in the startup.The report added that the unwind comes at a time when Manus is experiencing financial growth. Since being bought by Meta, the startup’s annualised revenue run rate has surged to between $400 million and $500 million in recent weeks. This marks a leap from the $100 million revenue run rate it recorded when Meta initially acquired it.
Why Meta bought Manus
Meta originally bought the Singapore-based startup to bolster its own internal research into “agentic AI” – a technology where AI undertakes and complete tasks with minimum human intervention. Manus specialises in creating highly advanced AI agents with this capability.The deal quickly drew the attention of Chinese regulators, who launched an immediate review to determine if Meta’s takeover violated regional investment rules. Following Beijing’s official unwinding order, Meta has already executed a strict internal operational split from Manus and completely halted all cross-company data sharing.“Chinese-origin AI now carries a kind of reversibility risk that no clever deal structure can price out,” Matthias Hendrichs, a Singapore-based adviser to global AI companies, told Bloomberg when China told Meta to ‘unwind’ the deal.“Once another company’s engineers have been inside your stack, you can delete the repository, but you can’t make them unsee what they’ve seen,” he added.
