The Chinese startup behind Manus AI secured a round of financing led by US venture firm Benchmark, scoring capital to explore the use of artificial intelligence agents to replace everyday tasks.

The Silicon Valley investor was joined by several of the startup’s existing backers in a $75 million funding that roughly quintupled its valuation to almost half a billion dollars, people familiar with the matter said. The company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, intends to use the capital to expand its service to other markets including the US, Japan and the Middle East, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

Manus in March previewed what it called a general AI agent capable of screening resumes, creating trip itineraries and analyzing stocks in response to basic instructions. Its service performed better on some fronts than OpenAI’s Deep Research, another recently released agent, the company claimed at the time. Since then, several companies from ByteDance Ltd. to Baidu Inc. have followed suit with their own competing agentic AI platforms.
Representatives for Manus declined to comment, while Benchmark didn’t respond to queries.

While AI agents require a certain amount of hand-holding, Manus co-founder and chief scientist Ji Yichao has said its product is “truly autonomous.” A slick video demonstration from the company quickly went viral, prompting a scramble for a limited number of access cores and earning the startup comparisons to DeepSeek, the Chinese upstart that rattled Silicon Valley in January with a capable yet low-cost AI model.

Like DeepSeek, Manus sparked questions about the US lead on artificial intelligence — this time in a product category that American tech companies see as a key investment area. Initial reactions from Manus users were mixed: some declared it groundbreaking, others said it felt half-finished.

Last month, the startup began offering a $39-per-month subscription and a $199 upgraded option — in line with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro, though somewhat aggressive pricing for a membership service still in a testing phase.

Manus raised more than $10 million in previous financing, several China-based media outlets have reported, including from Tencent Holdings Ltd. and prominent VC firms ZhenFund and HSG, formerly Sequoia China.