Tencent Eyes $2 Billion Stake in Manus, Poised to Become Its Largest Shareholder

Manus was always an awkward fit: a Chinese-built AI startup that went viral, pivoted to Singapore, scrubbed its domestic ties — and then got blocked from foreign acquisition by Beijing. Now Tencent wants in.

The Chinese internet and gaming giant is in advanced talks to invest roughly $2 billion in Manus, according to sources cited by the Financial Times. The deal would make Tencent the startup’s largest shareholder, reshaping an ownership structure that has become a flashpoint in US-China tech tensions.

Tencent is negotiating with ZhenFund, Sequoia Capital, and Manus’s management team. The discussions remain fluid and could involve additional investors, but early American backers like Benchmark are expected to sit out the round. Neither Tencent, Manus, nor Meta responded to requests for comment.

The deal comes nearly a year after Beijing blocked Meta’s attempt to acquire Manus outright. China’s National Development and Reform Commission — the country’s top economic planning body — ruled that a foreign acquisition would violate national security regulations, a decision state media framed as a crackdown on “bath-style exits,” where Chinese-founded startups legally restructure to sever domestic ties.

Manus launched in March 2025 by Butterfly Effect, a Beijing-based startup, and exploded in popularity as a general-purpose AI agent capable of autonomously completing complex tasks. But by June of that year, the company had relocated its headquarters to Singapore, drastically cut its China-based workforce, and halted all services within the country. The abrupt pivot away from its engineering roots in China sparked heated debate — a Chinese-built AI darling seemed to be scrubbing its origins for Western investors.

The ownership picture got more complicated in May 2026, when Bloomberg reported that Manus founders Xiao Hong, Ji Yichao, and Zhang Tao were exploring a roughly $1 billion buyback from external investors, signaling a desire to consolidate control. A Tencent investment would upend that playbook entirely, handing the Chinese giant the largest single stake rather than letting founders reclaim it.

If completed, the deal would give Tencent a powerful foothold in the AI agent space at a moment when major Chinese tech companies are racing to deploy autonomous AI tools. Manus’s technology — a general-purpose agent that can browse the web, write code, and manipulate software — complements Tencent’s sprawling ecosystem of WeChat, gaming, and enterprise products. Whether the founders, who spent the past year trying to buy back their company, would welcome Tencent as their new controlling shareholder is another question entirely.