Meta's $2B Manus Deal Is Gone. So Is 8 Months of User Data.

TL;DR

On September 1, Manus resumed operating as an independent company. Meta had closed its roughly $2 billion acquisition on December 29, 2025; 119 days later China's National Development and Reform Commission prohibited the investment and ordered the transaction withdrawn. A Tencent led group of earlier backers bought Meta's stake out at the same $2 billion mark, the founding team is running the company again, and part of the bill for the unwind landed on users: data generated on or after December 29, 2025 was deleted for affected accounts over a 24 hour window in late August, recoverable only from a backup you took yourself.

What actually happened, in order

Manus is the general purpose agent product from Butterfly Effect, a company founded in China in 2022 that later domiciled in Singapore. The agent launched in March 2025. By its own December accounting it reached $100 million in ARR eight months after launch, with a total revenue run rate over $125 million, more than 147 trillion tokens processed, more than 80 million virtual computers created, and 105 employees across Singapore, Tokyo and San Francisco. Twelve days after that post went up, Meta closed the acquisition.

Then the deal met a regulator that, on paper, was not party to it. On April 27, 2026 the NDRC prohibited the investment and ordered the transaction revoked, on national security grounds tied to outbound investment and technology export rules. Meta completed an operational split by June 11: data sharing halted, Manus staff cut off from Meta internal systems, Meta employees barred from using Manus tools internally. In July, Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG repurchased Butterfly Effect at the same $2 billion valuation, Tencent taking the largest stake while remaining a minority holder.

Domicile is not jurisdiction

This is the part worth sitting with, because it is the least intuitive. Manus had already moved. Singapore entity, data stored in the US and Singapore, a Benchmark led round on the cap table. None of it mattered. Beijing's outbound investment and technology export rules follow the founders and the technology rather than the mailing address. It is a little like selling the car you drove across the state line and discovering the title is still in your parents' names.

The number Meta thought it was buying

This was not a science project acquisition. Manus went from $100 million ARR in December 2025 to somewhere in the $400 million to $500 million annualized range by mid 2026, depending on who is counting. Caixin puts it at about $400 million by late June. Sacra estimates $450 million annualized for June. 36Kr's account of the independence announcement gives the $400 million to $500 million band. Manus itself has confirmed nothing past the December post.

For scale: total outside funding before Meta was $85 million, including a $75 million round led by Benchmark in April 2025 at roughly a $500 million valuation. Meta held the fastest company on record to go from zero to $100 million ARR for about six months, which is roughly the length of a probation period.

The compliance step that landed on users

Read the note Manus posted to users and the mechanics are blunt. Affected accounts had from August 11 until 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23 to run a backup tool, with free service during the window. From 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, data generated on or after December 29, 2025 was deleted. Access returned at 8:00 a.m. on August 25 alongside a restoration portal, which is still open with no announced deadline, plus a return bonus for affected users.

Note carefully what that portal does. It restores what you backed up. It is not a company side snapshot of your work waiting to be un-deleted. If you missed a twelve day window in August, the agent sessions, files and outputs you generated across the eight months of Meta ownership are gone. Manus never named the jurisdictions whose rules required this, and it has not published a count of affected accounts.

What Manus says comes next

The announcement is short on product and long on direction. Chief executive Xiao Hong, chief scientist Ji Yichao and product partner Zhang Tao named three priorities: integrating further into daily work workflows, interacting more directly with the physical world, and taking more proactive actions on a user's behalf. Zhang called the next launch the most ambitious product project since the company was founded, with iteration speed at an all time high. Apply the standard discount for a founder quote on announcement day.

If you build on somebody else's agent

• Test the export path before you need it. Manus shipped a purpose built backup tool for this event. Most agent platforms have not, and a twelve day window is not enough time to write a scraper against an undocumented session API.
• Corporate events are data events. An acquisition, a divestiture, a regional exit and a regulator's order all end at the same place: someone's compliance team deciding which rows have to disappear. Treat any vendor change of control as a trigger to pull a full export that week.
• Jurisdiction follows the founders. Reincorporating in Singapore did not put Manus outside Beijing's reach. If your vendor's technical leadership sits in a country with outbound technology rules, that is a live dependency in your stack, not trivia.
• Watch what survives the reshuffle. Manus kept its product, its team and its growth through six months of being fought over. That is the actual signal here, and it is more interesting than the $2 billion.

What is not confirmed

• Manus has not published how many accounts were affected or how much data was deleted.
• The specific jurisdictions and statutes behind the deletion are not named in the company's own notice.
• Current revenue is reported by third parties. The last company confirmed figure is the December 2025 post.
• The post independence cap table has not been published. Tencent's stake is described as largest and minority, without a percentage.

Key Takeaways

• Manus resumed independent operations on September 1, 2026, eight months after Meta closed a roughly $2 billion acquisition on December 29, 2025.
• China's NDRC prohibited the investment and ordered the deal withdrawn on April 27, 2026, 119 days after it closed, on national security grounds tied to outbound investment and technology export rules.
• Tencent, ZhenFund and HSG repurchased the parent company at the same $2 billion valuation in July, with Tencent the largest but still minority holder.
• Data generated on or after December 29, 2025 was deleted for affected accounts between August 23 and August 24, with a self service backup window from August 11 and a restore portal open from August 25.
• Reported annualized revenue rose from a company confirmed $100 million in December 2025 to roughly $400 million to $500 million by mid 2026, per Caixin, Sacra and 36Kr.
• The transferable lesson: a vendor's change of control is a data retention event, and a Singapore address does not move a company out of its founders' regulatory jurisdiction.

Sources: Manus, A Note to Our Users, Manus, $100M ARR update, Caixin Global, 36Kr, TechNode, Sacra, eWeek, Tech Startups