Lately AI circles have been buzzing about a rumor: Tencent is leading a group to buy Manus back from Meta for around $2 billion, then reorganize it and take it public in Hong Kong. The eye-catching detail? The valuation has stayed exactly the same since Meta first tried to acquire the company last year. Sixteen months, three different sets of owners, but the number never moved. Let’s unpack this story in simple terms and see what’s actually driving it.
1. How Manus Reached a $2 Billion Valuation So Fast
Manus started as Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology. Its founder, Xiao Hong (born in 1993 and a Huazhong University of Science and Technology graduate), had already built earlier tools like Monica and Yiban Assistant. In March 2025 the product launched publicly as the “world’s first general AI Agent” — basically an AI that can automatically handle complete workflows, such as writing code or managing repetitive tasks with minimal human input.
Money came in quickly. ZhenFund joined the earliest seed round. In November 2024 Sequoia China led the A round with Tencent following. In April 2025 Silicon Valley’s Benchmark led the B round with $75 million, pushing the valuation to $500 million. That fast climb set the stage for what happened next.
2. Meta Wanted It — Then Regulators Blocked the Deal
In December 2025 Bloomberg and CNBC reported that Meta planned to spend over $2 billion to acquire Manus and fold it into its super-intelligence lab. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly got personally involved and the deal was reportedly wrapped up in just ten days. It was called one of Meta’s biggest AI moves at the time.
Chinese regulators saw it differently. In January 2026 the Ministry of Commerce began reviewing the deal. By late April the National Development and Reform Commission’s foreign investment security review office blocked it outright. The clear reason: Manus was founded by a Chinese team, serves many Chinese users, and holds local data and usage scenarios. Regulators did not want that technology and data moving directly to a foreign company. In May Meta agreed to cancel the transaction, started refunding money, cut off data sharing, and removed Manus employees from its internal systems.
3. Old Investors Now Want to Buy It Back at the Same Price
By mid-June reports surfaced that early Chinese investors were planning to repurchase the company from Meta at the original $2 billion price. In early July the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported that Tencent is now leading the effort, bringing in ZhenFund, Sequoia China and other original backers to form a new consortium. They would buy Meta’s shares at the unchanged $2 billion valuation and prepare the company for a Hong Kong listing after reorganization.
The valuation stayed frozen the entire time — from Meta’s attempted purchase through the rumored domestic buyback. That single unchanged number is the most telling clue in the whole story.
4. The Real Driver: Keeping the Investment “Alive” on Fund Books
Venture capital funds don’t treat every investment the same way regular people might expect. They know most startups fail, but for the fund itself, a company going out of business and the investment being completely written off on paper are two different things. As long as the company isn’t formally liquidated, the investment can still sit on the books at a high value.
Here’s how it works in plain language: A fund’s managers (called GPs) raise money from outside investors (called LPs — think pension funds, university endowments, or wealthy individuals). When a startup exits at a high price, the managers receive a performance bonus (called “carry”). They can also use the big exit story to raise their next fund from new LPs. Later, when the fund reaches its exit phase, it needs to return money to the original LPs — and a high-value exit makes those numbers look much better.
When regulators killed the Meta deal, the funds suddenly faced a problem: bonuses already paid out, fundraising stories already told, and money already returned to LPs would all look bad if the investment dropped to zero. The cleanest solution was to keep the valuation exactly where it was by having the original Chinese investors buy the company back among themselves. That way the $2 billion number stays on the books and everyone’s accounting stays tidy — at least for now.
5. Why Is Tencent Leading the Buyback? It’s Probably Not Mainly for Internal Use
Tencent has plenty of cash on hand (it recently sold a large chunk of Kuaishou shares for roughly $1.6 billion and continues investing in AI, including a stake in Kling). But buying an external AI team isn’t always straightforward inside a big company.
Tencent had just finished an internal competition between its WorkBuddy and QClaw AI tools — QClaw lost and WorkBuddy became the main internal product. Adding another external team like Manus could easily create conflicts over resources, direction, and credit. A previous example shows the pattern: Tencent invested in the Windsurf team (project name Antigravity) with plans to integrate it, but it clashed with the internal CodeBuddy team and has remained separately operated ever since. Big companies often prefer to keep external teams at arm’s length rather than force integration that disrupts existing groups.
6. Does Manus Still Have Strong Technology?
Before tools like Claude Code, Codex, and xAI’s Grok Build appeared, Manus had a genuine edge — it could automatically connect AI agents to real-world workflows. That originality helped it stand out early.
Its biggest limitation, however, is the lack of its own foundational AI model. Companies that control their own models (such as Zhipu’s Zcode, MiniMax’s code model, or Tencent’s CodeBuddy) have more leverage and can build their own agents on top. Startups without their own model often find their valuation already high while later investors become reluctant to pay more, and much of the long-term value ends up captured by the model owners instead. Similar agent-focused companies — Perplexity, Cursor, Windsurf, and Character.AI — have each followed different paths, with varying degrees of success.
7. Who Might Actually Be Taking the Risk?
Right now this looks less like a traditional business acquisition and more like a coordinated effort to keep a nearly written-off investment looking valuable on paper at the original $2 billion level. Tencent, Meta, and the regulators are all playing roles in that larger story.
If the company eventually lists on the Hong Kong stock exchange, everyday retail investors would be the ones deciding whether the technology can actually support that valuation going forward. As long as the project stays “not dead,” the high number can remain on fund balance sheets. Once public shareholders are involved, the judgment shifts to whether the product can keep leading in a fast-moving field.
Capital narratives sometimes move faster than the underlying technology. Paying attention to the incentives behind the numbers helps us read these headlines with clearer eyes.
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