Manus revenue soars to $400-500M as its original backers move to buy it back from Meta
Six months after Meta Platforms paid roughly $2B to acquire it, Manus AI is being prised back out — and it is leaving as a far bigger company than the one Meta bought. The agentic AI startup is now generating an annualised $400-500M in revenue, up from around $100M when the deal closed in December 2025, according to The Information. That growth is the engine of an unusual reversal: Manus's early backers are now planning to repurchase the business at the same ~$2B price Meta paid, buying back a materially larger company at the valuation set just months earlier.
The unwinding was not the founders' idea. China's regulators ordered the cross-border acquisition reversed in April 2026, treating Manus as within scope of Chinese investment-review rules despite the company having relocated its headquarters and team to Singapore in 2025 and incorporated there before the Meta deal. The precedent is the real story for dealmakers: redomiciling to Singapore no longer neutralises Chinese-origin AI from Beijing's review — a warning shot for any US-led acquisition of a target with Chinese roots.
Meta has already moved to comply, severing operational ties with Manus — halting data sharing and stripping it out of internal systems. Tellingly, the company has kept shipping through the separation, rolling out integrations with Similarweb and Shopify even as it is carved back out. Not every original investor is along for the ride: US firm Benchmark has already taken its proceeds from the Meta deal and is sitting the buyback out, leaving Asian backers — Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund — to drive the repurchase.
The end state is a neat inversion of where this began. A blocked American acquisition is set to become a domestically owned, standalone business, with Manus expected to re-incorporate in China on a revenue base several times larger than when the deal was first struck — what one observer called "a W for China."
Read more: The Information · TechCrunch · Reuters
