When a Chinese AI startup chooses to move its headquarters overseas and lay off its local team, is it “fleeing” or “going overseas”? This article delves into the strategic considerations behind this phenomenon: from the weakness of the domestic payment ecosystem, to the temptation of the global market, to the dual attack of geopolitics and capital pressures. Why do AI entrepreneurs choose to be “born global”? This is not only a business choice, but also a game of identity, resources and the future.
Manus, an AI startup that set off a boiling climax in domestic self-media a few months ago, reported layoffs. According to the news, Manus has laid off its business in China, and the original domestic team of about 120 people has been laid off, except for more than 40 core technical personnel who have been retained and moved to Singapore.
In its response, Manus did not deny the layoffs, only saying that “based on the company’s own operating efficiency, we have decided to adjust some business teams.” The company will continue to focus on core business development and improve overall operational efficiency. ”
After DeepSeek set off a wave of domestic AI at the beginning of the year, Manus was once regarded as another source of pride. But the company may not have intended to target the domestic market in the first place. Although its earliest R&D teams are located in Beijing and Wuhan, it has hardly done any publicity on domestic platforms except for inviting some domestic geek user experiences in the early days.
Its first promotional video was first released on overseas social media platforms such as Youtube and X, and the founder introduced the product in fluent English. The Manus promotional video that triggered a large number of retweets on the video account was not released by the official account, but only on the team’s co-founder Zhang Tao’s personal video account “Hidden Cloud Thoughts”. Its website was originally only available in English, not Chinese.
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Although Manus has also opened official accounts on domestic social media such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Channels, Weibo, etc., it has never released any updates. Only Channels released a news of strategic cooperation with Ali Tongyi Qianwen, and Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo were all blank.
That’s not to say that Manus doesn’t value social media communication. For an AI application company targeting C-end users, social media publicity is a top priority, but all of Manus’ publicity is focused overseas. For example, they have never posted videos on TikTok, but in the past four months, they have posted nearly 80 short videos on TikTok and 33 promotional videos on YouTube.
Manus’ TikTok homepage
Even though Manus has been covered by domestic media far more than overseas media in the past few months, the founding team rarely appears in China. In March this year, it was originally reported that Manus founder Xiao Hong would participate in the 2025 NVIDIA Startup Showcase Wuhan event in China and give a public speech, but in the end it did not take place.
The founding team spent more time overseas to communicate with foreign developers and talk to technology giants. For example, Manus co-founder and chief scientist Ji Yichao recently had a conversation with YouTube co-founder and CTO Chen Shijun. Manus angel investor Zhen Fund posted a transcript of the conversation on its official WeChat account, titled “Dialogue between Two Generations of Startups”.
Manus also holds many offline open events and recruits core users called “Manus Fellows” around the world, but these activities and recruitments are not in China, but in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Saudi Arabia and other overseas regions.
When Manus was first released in early March, it once created a hot scene of “hard to find”, and a Manus invitation code on the second-hand trading platform could be sold for tens of thousands of yuan. But if you open the official website Manus.im of Manus now, you will find that it is not accessible at all because their products and website are not registered in China. Previously, the website Manus.cn that Manus had obtained in China could no longer be opened.
Part of the reason may be related to the fact that most of the model bases used by Manus are overseas models. Previously, Manus had reached a cooperation with Tongyi Qianwen, announcing that the two parties would implement all the functions of Manus on domestic models and computing power platforms based on the Tongyi Qianwen series of open source models, but there was no more news in the past few months. After Manus disbanded the domestic team, the cooperation added a layer of shadow. Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment from “On the Mountain”.
There has been a lot of discussion in the technology media about Manus’ market choices, such as the poor domestic AI payment ecosystem, and Manus is more likely to gain paying users overseas.
Overseas, ChatGPT can gain more than 20 million paying users with a $20 Plus membership, and the media said its annual revenue is expected to hit $12.7 billion, while Wen Xin Yiyan in China can only be forced to cancel payments under the impact of DeepSeek.
Aravind Srinivas, the founder of Perplexity AI, said three months ago that Perplexity’s annualized revenue has exceeded $100 million, and said there is still a lot of room for monetization.
Aravind Srinivas spoke
Manus’ official website currently lists three paid memberships: Basic, Plus, and Pro, with monthly membership fees of $19, $39, and $199 respectively, which is expensive for domestic users.
Domestic Internet companies have also launched many general-purpose agent products similar to Manus, such as Byte’s button, Baidu’s heartbeat, and so on. The overseas version of Byte Buckle has announced the paid price, with three membership prices of $9, $19 and $39 respectively. Compared with these wealthy Internet giants, Manus is difficult to reach in terms of financial and material resources.
In recent days, with the news of Manus’ domestic layoffs, the media has begun to emphasize that Manus has moved its global headquarters to Singapore. But it’s hard to say that this is a move that has only been decided in recent months. Manus’ Singaporean company “Butterfly Effect” was incorporated as early as August last year, but it has only been officially launched in recent months. Now Manus’ official website says, “Today, Manus’ global headquarters are located in Singapore. ”
Introduced on the official website of Manus
In June this year, when the company’s co-founder Zhang Tao spoke at the SuperAI conference held in Singapore, he also publicly stated that they are a Singapore-based company with offices in Tokyo and California. He did not mention their offices in Beijing and Wuhan.
They are also recruiting heavily, and Zhang Tao said that they have a lot of vacancies and everyone is welcome to join. Manus’ official website lists recruitment requirements for 21 positions with annual salaries of up to one million yuan, but these positions are all located in Singapore.
It’s no wonder that there were a lot of accusations when Manus exploded in the early days. Some remarks believe that the company has taken advantage of the rise of domestic AI set off by DeepSeek, and has been regarded as the next “light of domestic products”, “pride of domestic AI”, etc. in waves of applause, but in fact it is a product mainly for overseas markets and overseas users.
However, this does not erase Manus’ own application breakthroughs and paradigm innovations, it still represents the pride of Chinese AI entrepreneurs. Its parent company, Butterfly Effect, is still registered and operated in China. The Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily visited Manus’ Wuhan office, and on-site employees said that the Wuhan office is still operating normally.
Manus is also not the first Chinese AI startup team to set up its headquarters overseas. For example, the AI video generation tool platform HeyGen moved from Shenzhen to Los Angeles, and Jing Kun, former vice president of Baidu Group and CEO of Xiaodu Technology, chose to start a business in the United States from the beginning. They also constantly emphasize their globalization background. The same is true for those Internet companies that have successfully gone overseas, such as Byte’s TikTok, Pinduoduo’s Temu and Shein, etc., whose official websites also indicate that they are headquartered overseas.
If only ByteDance can be called a truly global company in the mobile Internet era, many entrepreneurs in the AI era are determined to go global from the beginning. Investors are also happy to push startups to go global, and Deng Mingsheng, founder of Yushi Capital, recently said, “AI application entrepreneurship is born globally. He said that in particular, the agent direction naturally has cross-language and cross-scene capabilities. If you target global users from the beginning, the product ceiling will be higher and the opportunities will be greater.
Compared with Internet companies, AI entrepreneurs are also more affected by geopolitical factors, and they have to face multiple constraints such as capital and computing power, and they also have to start their global transformation earlier.
In April this year, foreign media reported that Manus’ parent company, Butterfly Effect, completed a new round of financing of $75 million led by Benchmark, a well-known venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, with a post-investment valuation of nearly $500 million. Related reports say that the investment is still under review by the U.S. Treasury Department. The United States has previously issued a ban on investment in China, especially in the field of artificial intelligence.
Before the launch of Manus, investors in the butterfly effect included Tencent, Sequoia China and Zhen Fund.
