Manus Bio

Manus is an AI agent company whose March 2025 product launch video went viral rapidly enough that even investor Liu Yuan, a partner at ZhenFund, woke to three red dots of unread messages on WeChat . The company was co-founded by Xiao Hong, who named it after the Latin word for "hand" — one of several candidates that included "Dodo" (rejected by Anna Fang for its extinction and dimwit connotations) and "Vida" . Liu Yuan had backed Xiao Hong across roughly a decade of entrepreneurship, though he worried publicly whether celebrating Manus's success amounted to "popping champagne at halftime" . The product itself was positioned as a general-purpose agent, part of a wave that 暗涌Waves described as one of two extremes in the market — the "magic black box" end — alongside more vertical tools . Tencent later led an investment in Manus's development team Monica . Liu Yuan's own emotional investment was considerable: elsewhere's interview notes counted 16 instances of him crying during the conversation, alongside 43 of "hahaha" .