Entrepreneurship Was the Career Starting Point
While studying software engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Xiao Hong built campus weather and WeChat-wall products around public WeChat accounts. On January 20, 2015, while still a senior, he registered Wuhan Nightingale Technology; after graduation he did not take a full-time role at a mature company.
The early campus social and trading products did not grow, cash nearly ran out, and the team at one point prepared to accept offers from large technology companies. The real turning point was not persisting with the original direction but narrowing the problem: he built Yiban around WeChat editing efficiency, then expanded to Weiban for enterprise WeChat. A HUST alumni page says the two products had served more than two million B2B users in total by 2023, but this is not audited data.
Deliberately Replacing an Existing Advantage
In 2022 he founded Butterfly Effect, moving from WeChat-ecosystem SaaS to AI applications for global markets. The team had no ready-made overseas living network, so the choice looked more like deliberately changing the capability boundary than casually internationalizing.
Monica began as a browser AI assistant and solved cold start by integrating or acquiring existing plugins. An investor recalled that the product grew from thousands of users to millions and exceeded several million dollars in ARR. These figures are investor recollections, but at minimum show that before Manus the team had already validated overseas distribution and payment.
Manus's Eight Months
Manus officially launched on March 6, 2025. It changed the interaction from “answering a question” to having an Agent decompose and complete tasks inside a cloud computer, and its invitation-only test quickly attracted global attention. Two months later, Benchmark led a $75 million financing; in the middle of the year, the company moved its headquarters and key team to Singapore.
By December 2025, Manus officially self-reported ARR above $100 million, a total revenue run rate above $125 million, and a team of 105. This speed is a representative result, but the measurement must stay precise: run rate annualizes the revenue pace at that time; it is not confirmed full-year revenue.
An Exit That Did Not Complete
On December 29, 2025, Meta announced the acquisition of Manus, with media reporting a transaction valuation of about $2–3 billion. Chinese regulators subsequently required the transaction to be withdrawn, and on September 1, 2026 Manus officially announced a return to independent operation. Caixin reported that the original investors completed a buyback of about $2 billion, with Tencent becoming the largest shareholder; the complete transaction documents were not public.
During the review, Xiao Hong and chief scientist Yichao Ji were interviewed by the National Development and Reform Commission in March 2026 and told not to leave the country; reports did not show formal charges. In August, reports said the restriction was preparing to be lifted, but there was no official lifting decision, and the independence announcement did not mention the two people's travel status.
This episode therefore cannot be written as “successfully sold to Meta” or “Xiao Hong cashed out billions.” It looks more like an organizational experiment rewritten by geopolitical regulation: the product had globalized and the company had moved to Singapore, but the founder's control and exit path remained constrained by cross-border policy.
2026: Manus 2.0 and Cue, a Bet on the Resident Agent
On September 28, 2026, Manus released Manus 2.0, only 27 days after returning to independence. The company described it as a new architecture rather than a version update: its in-house Cascade framework handles orchestration, the cloud computer keeps projects running in a dedicated environment, automation is triggered by external events, and Manus Studio puts video editing and game development into a desktop workbench.
It also launched Cue, a standalone personal-agent application for phones and desktops. Both point in the same direction: an Agent is no longer merely “give it one task and wait for completion,” but stays online and handles matters proactively for the user. “Resident Agent” is this site's summary, not official terminology.
Another line is a return to the Chinese market. On the day after the release, the company announced through a public WeChat account that it was forming a team for domestic-market products and would work with Chinese model providers. It had closed its China office more than a year earlier; Tencent is now the largest shareholder, and Bloomberg reported a valuation of about $4 billion for the new financing, but the company has not yet announced it officially.