The Chinese start-up Manus is in talks to raise 500 million dollars (around 460 million euros) at an estimated valuation of 4 billion dollars. The figure itself is unremarkable for this industry. The route to it is not - less than a year ago the same firm was sold to Meta for two billion, then Beijing stopped the deal, then it bought itself back from its own investors at around two billion. Now it is asking for twice as much.

The chronology is worth laying out because it tells the story better than any comment. Manus became visible last year after a demonstration of its artificial intelligence agent. It entered the middle of 2025 by relocating its staff to Singapore. In December it announced that Meta was buying it for two billion dollars, with annual recurring revenue reported at the time as above 100 million dollars. Then fears prevailed in China that the country was losing its researchers and talent to the West - and Beijing blocked the deal, citing possible breaches of export controls and foreign investment rules.

What followed resembles a divorce with a division of servers. The firm spent months disentangling itself from its American owner. Early investors helped it buy back its own shares. In August it told users to export and save their own data, because it had to delete everything created after the Meta takeover - in order to "comply with regulatory requirements in certain jurisdictions". A client carrying their own archive home is a rare scene in this industry.

This month Manus announced it is operating independently again and that the founding team remains in charge. Possible investors in the new round include IDG Capital, Boyu Capital and the battery maker CATL, alongside existing backers Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund. A restructuring is also mentioned, in preparation for a listing in Hong Kong.

The product, incidentally, is nothing the competition does not have - a chatbot and tools with which a user builds applications, websites, designs, presentations and video, similar to what OpenAI, Lovable and Replit offer. Manus did not respond to a request for comment.

What this story shows is not about the product. A valuation twice as high after a blocked sale and after deleting data is a valuation of something else - of the fact that the company stayed Chinese. When the state decides a start-up may not be sold, it stops being merely a company. How many start-ups from this region would get that kind of protection - and how many of them would want it?