Manus Is Independent Again, but Whose Records Are Gone?

Pebblous Data Communication Team

Executive Summary

This article reads the funding that Butterfly Effect, the parent company of the Chinese AI agent firm Manus, announced on 8 October 2026 together with the ten months the company passed through to reach it. A company Meta bought, and then had to let go of on an order from Beijing, has taken its new money from Chinese investors.

The condition attached to the separation is the part worth looking at. In unwinding the acquisition, Manus deleted data that certain users had created on or after 29 December 2025, the day Meta's purchase closed. The note that went to users described the target only as data created from that date onward, while the help centre article attached to the note names four things: accounts, subscription records, task data and all Manus-generated artifacts, and third-party connector authorizations. None of this followed a breach. It came out of unwinding a contract under a regulator's order.

The facts and quotations in sections 1 through 3 come from TechCrunch's report, from the August notice and help centre articles Manus published itself, and from coverage and legal commentary on the Chinese order. Sections 4 and 5 move the story onto who owns an agent's records, and that move is this article's reading rather than any party's claim.

Key Numbers

Four numbers. The first two give the size of the money, the last two the terms of the separation that preceded it.

Sources: TechCrunch (8 October 2026), Manus notice (11 August 2026), Manus Help Center.

$500M+

New funding into Butterfly Effect

Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led; Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund followed

$2B

The Meta acquisition that was undone

A deal that closed in December 2025 was ordered reversed in April 2026

29 Dec 2025

The cut-off that defined what went

The day Meta's purchase closed; records laid down after it were deleted

4 items

Named on the deletion list

Accounts, subscription records, task data with all generated artifacts, connector authorizations

1

Where the $500 Million Came From

Manus is a general-purpose AI agent that made its name in 2025 on the strength of a single public demo. Give it a goal and it aims to search the web, write code, draft documents and hand back a finished result. It now covers coding tools and design and video generation as well, and this year's releases include Manus 2.0 and Cue, a separate app that gives an agent its own email address, phone number and wallet so it can move on its own. The parent company is Butterfly Effect, which relocated staff to Singapore in mid-2025.

▲ Official Manus logo | Source: Manus Brand Assets

On 8 October the company said in a WeChat post that it had raised more than $500 million. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing investors Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China) and ZhenFund joined. Chinese capital accounts for nearly the whole list. The announcement went out through Chinese social media rather than an English press release, and that detail points the same way the money does.

The valuation was not disclosed. Reports last month had the company in talks with investors about raising $500 million at a $4 billion valuation, which is a conversation and not a confirmed figure. One number is firmer. In December 2025, when Meta announced it was buying the company, Manus was said to be pulling in annual recurring revenue of over $100 million.

On what the money is for, the company offered a single line: it will continue hiring both at home and abroad. A company headquartered in Singapore and funded by Chinese investors put home and abroad in the same sentence and left it there.

The phrase that follows the round through every report is "first since the split with Meta." That phrase carries most of the meaning. It says there was a stretch when no money was coming in, and the rest of this article is about why that stretch existed.

2

China Ordered the Deal Unwound Four Months Later

Meta announced in December 2025 that it was buying Manus in a deal worth $2 billion, and the transaction closed on the 29th of that month. Signals that China's commerce ministry was looking at it began in January. Then on 27 April 2026 the office of the foreign investment security review working mechanism, which sits under the National Development and Reform Commission, prohibited the acquisition and ordered the parties to restore the position they had been in before it.

The instrument behind the order is the Measures for the Security Review of Foreign Investment, in force since January 2021. It gives regulators the power to review inbound foreign investment that could affect national security and to block or reverse it, and this was the first time a decision on an individual transaction had been made public. Two issues are reported to have driven the review: whether foreign investment rules had been broken, and whether technology developed in China was passing to a US company. TechCrunch set the order against intensifying worries in China over losing AI talent and researchers to the West.

Having moved its headquarters and core staff to Singapore in 2025 did not carry Manus around that judgement. What counted was less where the entity was registered than where the technology and the people had come from. Chinese state media at the time made the same point, noting that the early research and development had happened in China and that the core data originated there.

Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China and an early adviser to Alibaba, told CNBC in the days after the order: "Clearly after Manusgate, founders will know that if you start in China, you stay in China." He called the decision draconian, and placed it near the far end of the range of outcomes anyone had expected.

By the time the order came, the deal was done. Staff had moved into Meta's Singapore office and the proceeds had been paid out to investors. Reversing it therefore took more than paperwork. Meta completed the operational separation on 11 June, cut off data sharing and told staff to sunset the platform. Manus announced its return to independent operation on 11 August.

The diagram below sets out, in order, what happened across the ten months from the acquisition announcement to this round.

▲ Pebblous original diagram | Sources: TechCrunch, Al Jazeera, The Next Web, Trending Topics, Manus Help Center

3

What Was Inside "Some User Data"

The notice of 11 August carried two messages. The company was returning to independent operation, and data created by certain users on or after 29 December 2025 would be deleted. The notice itself explained that the date was not arbitrary. It is the day Meta's acquisition of the company closed.

On the reason, Manus wrote one sentence: "This is part of our separation from Meta; we must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world." Which country and which rule went unnamed, and so did the number of affected users and the regions they were in. Those users, the company said, were being told separately by in-app notification and email.

The schedule was tight. The backup tool opened with the notice on 11 August and closed at 7.59 a.m. Singapore time on 23 August. Deletion began at 8 a.m. that same morning and ran until 7.59 a.m. on the 25th, and the window for restoring accounts and backups opened at 8 a.m. on the 25th. Manus paused sales of new subscriptions in the affected regions for a period, offered returning users a comeback bonus, and stated plainly that none of this was connected to a breach or a security incident.

Read only the notice and you cannot tell what was being deleted. The text that went to users called the target data generated since the Meta acquisition, and said no more. Open the help centre article attached to that notice, though, and there is a list. In the company's own words, the data to be deleted "may include the following, subject to the official notification you receive by email": accounts, subscription records, task data and all Manus-generated artifacts such as websites and slide presentations, and third-party connector authorizations. What sat inside the rounded-off phrase turns out to have been written down after all, and the last two of its four lines are the work users had asked the agent to do.

Who was affected was not arbitrary either. Manus sorted accounts into three types. Type A accounts either had no paid subscription or had one that started before acquisition day. Type B accounts had a paid subscription that started on or after that day. Type C accounts were created on or after acquisition day, or had their email or other user information changed then. Type A and Type B kept the account and lost the task data, artifacts and connector authorizations that had accumulated after the cut-off. Type C lost the account itself, and any Type C user without an account data backup had nowhere to return to and had to start again.

▲ Pebblous original diagram — Manus deletion scope by account type | Source: Manus Help Center, reconstructed

What disappeared was not confined to the screen either. Websites that Manus hosted went dark at 8 a.m. on 23 August, returning HTTP 503 to visitors with a system-managed Retry-After header; the one exception was /robots.txt, left open with HTTP 200 so that crawlers could keep working. What brings those sites back is not time but a person. The help centre article states that a site remains unavailable "until you actively complete Task Data restoration." Restoration can be completed only once, the only material for it is the backup file a user downloaded and kept, and connectors have to be re-enabled by hand afterwards.

The contents of a backup package show how wide the phrase "task data" reaches. For a web project built with Manus it covers project records and checkpoints, code and Git data, the Manus-hosted project database, the records inside it such as form submissions and orders, project storage and S3 files, SEO configuration, application keys and environment variables, scheduled-task configuration, and Shopify and Stripe integrations. Independently managed third-party databases, by contrast, are neither deleted nor restored by Manus and stay with their provider. Turn that around and everything inside the line was sitting on Manus's side.

Set it out this way and the blank is not the list but what lies outside it. The public documents go as far as "may include"; what was actually deleted for any individual depended on the email they received. Which country's rules the step was taken to satisfy, how many users were affected and where they were, remain undisclosed. Twelve days is generous for downloading finished files and short for remembering eight months of what you had asked an agent to do.

4

What Users Asked the Agent to Do Was on the Unwind List

When an acquisition comes apart, the things that get sorted out are usually the same ones. Equity, intellectual property, people, customer lists, shared system access. That list worked here as it always does. Staff walked out of Meta's offices and data sharing was cut. So far, a familiar picture.

▲ Pebblous original diagram — the new item added to the usual acquisition-unwind asset list | Pebblous analysis

The less familiar part is that one more entry joined it: the accumulated record of what users had asked the agent to do. Which requests they made, what context they supplied, what was produced, which outside services they had wired in. In this case that is not an item inferred from outside. The last two lines of the list Manus published are task data with all generated artifacts, and third-party connector authorizations. In an agent service a record like that is not a log. The quality of the next job rests on it, and for the user several months of work sit inside it.

One layer further out was caught as well. Among the items Manus listed for backup and restoration are form submissions and order histories, which are what visitors left on sites built with the agent. The reach of an ownership clean-up therefore covered not only the data of the person using the service but the data their own customers had left behind. Whoever put an agent to work was not only handing over their own records.

A record of asked-for work has two natures. From the company's side it is a data asset the service holds. From the user's side it is the history of their own work. On an ordinary day nothing turns on the two overlapping in one file. They have to be separated when ownership changes or a border is crossed, and what this case exposes is that the contracts and retention arrangements that would do the separating are not yet in place. Manus wrote the list, opened the backup tool and prepared a comeback bonus, and every one of those steps still began with a user reading a notice in time and pulling the files down by hand.

The Pebblous blog has come at a similar question through a different door before. Who Owns an AI Agent's Memory? looked at conversational memory vanishing as regulation shut services down. The trigger here is different. The service stayed up; the records went while the company changed owners and changed back. The endings are not the same, and what the user is left holding looks much the same.

So there are two ways to read this round. As a question of corporate survival, $500 million is a clear answer. As a question about the user's records, nothing has been answered. The list did appear, and it appeared twelve days before the deletion. If capital tries to cross a border again and the same procedure runs, there is still no document that tells you at sign-up what will be deleted when it does.

5

Why Pebblous Is Watching This Story

A story like this is usually filed under US-China technology rivalry. Inside a data team, something else stands out first. While one company's ownership changed and changed back, the working records of the people using its service became one of the items the separation had to dispose of. The question of whose data it is got answered by the procedure for undoing the acquisition rather than by the terms of service.

A team that has wired an agent into its work has three things worth checking now. Whether the agent platform in use offers a way to export task histories, artifacts and integration settings in one piece. Whether the scope of that export is written down anywhere. Whether the agreement says what happens to your data if the provider's ownership changes. All three are the kind of question nobody asks while the service is running normally, and nobody can usefully ask once a notice has gone up.

Laying the Manus answers over those three gives the check its shape. The export path existed, and it stayed open for twelve days. The scope was written in the help centre as four items, with the final determination handed off to each individual's email. What happened on a change of ownership was settled by a regulator's order and a separation process, not by an agreement. And restoration did not come back on by itself. The check is not finished until you have also asked who in the organisation is the person who presses that button.

This is a question of quality too. An agent's performance does not come from the model alone; it leans on the context that agent has built up. Lose the record and the same model produces work of a different standard. If quality management still means training data and nothing else, the account of what an organisation running agents actually owns will not add up.

Thank you for reading this far. The TechCrunch report on this round is here, and the Manus help centre article setting out the deletion list and the account types is here. If your team has actually opened the data export clause of the agent platform you use, we would be glad to hear what it said.

R

References