AI START-UP MANUS RAISES $500M AFTER META DEAL COLLAPSE

Butterfly Effect, the parent company of Chinese AI start-up Manus, said in a WeChat post that it has raised more than $500 million in a new funding round. The round was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China) and ZhenFund also taking part, according to the company. Butterfly Effect said it would continue hiring both in China and abroad. The funding comes after Meta's proposed acquisition of Manus, reportedly worth more than $2 billion, was abandoned. The company has not disclosed its valuation following the new investment.

The Meta deal collapsed after Chinese authorities raised concerns about national security and ordered Meta to unwind the arrangement, according to Silicon Republic. Manus said in August that it intended to resume operating as an independent company and would delete some user data as part of its separation from Meta, according to Reuters. It had previously been reported that the company was seeking to double its valuation to $4 billion through the latest financing round, which would make it the most valuable start-up of its kind in the country. Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, told CNBC that the fundraising showed the short-term fallout from the Meta case had been contained and that investors were willing to back Manus as an independent company.

Not everyone views the separation as straightforward. Matthias Hendrichs, a Singapore-based adviser to global AI firms, told CNBC that the close integration between the two companies would not disappear simply because the deal was reversed, saying engineers could not "forget what they learned" through the partnership. Separately, Meta announced in late September that it had hired the chief executive of MongoDB to lead a newly launched Meta Enterprise Platform, which it described as a new pillar of its business aimed at helping companies use AI. Manus has not set out further plans beyond continuing its hiring efforts.