Manus, an AI agent released by Chinese start-up Monica Photo: VCG

AI agent startup Manus is assembling a team to develop products for the China market, the company said Monday night via its Butterfly Effect WeChat channel. The move comes weeks after it resumed independent operations following the revocation of its acquisition by Meta.

The firm unveiled Manus 2.0 for overseas users alongside Cue, a personal AI agent app designed for everyday life. The company said it is also assembling a team to build products for China’s domestic market, while cooperation with domestic large model developers and ecosystem partners is progressing steadily.

The WeChat post also noted the firm is hiring for 11 positions across product, engineering, and operations.
 
Openings include full-time positions for product designers, agent product managers, agent full-stack engineers, business analysts, product marketing managers, agent evaluation engineers, user and product operations managers, user growth managers, video creative designers and LLM algorithm engineers. It also lists an internship for agent evaluation research.
 
The move comes after Manus formally resumed independent operations in September, following China’s order for Meta to unwind the acquisition.

“Manus has formally resumed independent operations,” the company said in an official announcement published on its website on September 1, adding that its founding team will continue to lead the company as it develops general AI agents for users worldwide.

The company also said the transition had required some users to back up and restore their data and had caused temporary access disruptions. Users who have backed up their data but not yet restored it can still do so through the company’s restoration portal, with no deadline for recovery, it said.

Manus rose to prominence in 2025 after launching a general-purpose AI agent capable of carrying out tasks with limited human input, and was briefly regarded by the industry as "the second DeepSeek," by some media outlets. The company later moved its operations from China to Singapore, drastically downsized its domestic team, retained only core technical staff, and ceased services and operations in China, according to media reports.

Meta announced its acquisition of Manus on December 29, 2025. Reuters reported that the deal was worth about $2 billion, while earlier reporting put the valuation at between $2 billion and $3 billion; the companies did not publicly disclose the final financial terms.

On April 27, the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, announced that the Office of the Foreign Investment Security Review Working Mechanism has, in accordance with laws and regulations, issued a decision to prohibit foreign investment in the Manus acquisition project and has ordered the parties involved to unwind the transaction.