Benchmark joins US$75m funding round in China’s Manus AI – report

As the global race for agentic AI heats up, US venture capital company Benchmark is the latest to invest in China’s Manus AI, says Bloomberg.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark has joined other investors in a new $75m funding round that would value the Chinese AI start-up at $500m.

It comes at a time when the annual Stanford AI index last week pointed to rising quality and competition from China’s AI players. Manus AI is aiming to replace everyday tasks with AI agents, a burgeoning part of the AI market.

“While the US maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap,” said the authors of this year’s AI Index. “Performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024.”

Citing sources close to the deal, Bloomberg says Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus AI, will use the funds raised from Benchmark and its other existing investors for international expansion into the Middle East, Japan and the US.

In March, Manus previewed its general AI Agent which it said could screen CVs, analyse stocks and create travel itineraries as well, if not better than OpenAI’s Deep Research. Testing by TechCrunch at the time had less than perfect results, but other companies such as Baidu and ByteDance have all jumped on board with competing AI agents.

Commentators immediately drew comparisons with the surprise quality of DeepSeek when the Chinese AI agent company released its model in January, as a signal that US AI leadership was under serious attack.

Manus last month launched a $39/month subscription offering, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, although the company itself admits it is still in testing phase. Existing investors are reported to include Tencent Holdings, HSG (formerly Sequoia) and ZhenFund.

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