Manus was, briefly, one of the most valuable exits in Chinese AI. Meta agreed to buy the agentic AI startup for more than $2bn late last year, then watched Beijing block the deal on national-security grounds. Now the company is being bought back by the people who owned it in the first place, and Tencent looks set to sit at the front of the queue.

Tencent is in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder, according to the Financial Times, whose report was picked up by Bloomberg and Reuters. The plan would see a consortium of the startup’s earlier investors repurchase it at the same $2bn valuation Meta had agreed to pay, effectively reversing the acquisition.

Tencent is expected to take the biggest slice, but the detail that matters is what it will not be. The company would remain a minority shareholder even as the largest single holder, according to the report, an arrangement that keeps any one investor from controlling a startup whose Chinese roots proved politically delicate.

The consortium is largely a reunion of Manus’ original backers. Alongside Tencent, it is said to include the venture firm ZhenFund and HSG, the investment house formerly known as Sequoia Capital China. New investors could still join the round, according to the report, while some former backers are expected to sit it out.

Among the likely absentees is Benchmark, the US venture firm that had been an early Manus investor. Its expected absence underlines how far the startup’s cap table is shifting from a mix of Chinese and American money toward a predominantly domestic one, which is broadly the outcome Beijing’s intervention pointed to.

Manus built its reputation on AI agents that carry out multi-step tasks with little human supervision, the same capability now driving a wave of investment into self-directed AI systems.

That capability is also what made it a prize worth $2bn to Meta and, in a different reading, a strategic asset China preferred not to see pass into foreign hands.

The company’s commercial trajectory helps explain the enthusiasm. During its brief period inside Meta’s orbit, with access to the larger company’s traffic and advertising channels, Manus’ annualised revenue is reported to have climbed to somewhere between $400m and $500m, up from around $100m before the deal.

Those figures come from Chinese-language reporting and have not been independently confirmed, so they are best treated as indicative rather than audited.

What the buyback restores is ownership, not necessarily that momentum. Unwinding an acquisition means Manus loses the distribution muscle that helped it grow so quickly, and the returning investors will have to fund the company’s next phase without a strategic parent behind it. A minority-heavy structure keeps control diffuse, which is reassuring to regulators and complicated for management.

The episode is also a marker of how China now handles its home-grown AI talent. Beijing has grown increasingly protective of the sector, and the reversal of the Meta deal, followed by a repatriation of ownership to domestic investors, reads as a template as much as a one-off. Companies built on agent technology have become assets the state watches closely.

For Tencent, the move fits a broader pattern of backing Chinese AI champions rather than watching them drift abroad. The company has spread bets across models, chips and applications, and taking the lead stake in a returning Manus keeps a prized asset within a stable it already knows well. A minority position lets it do that without triggering the concentration worries that dogged the Meta deal.

The talks are, for now, still talks. The structure is not final, the participants are not fully settled, and the valuation could yet move. What looks close to decided is the direction: Manus is coming home, and Tencent intends to be the largest name on the register when it does.