Global South·Southeast Asia·Group: Butterfly Effect
How to read these numbers: A purposive, publicly sourced case library, not a probability sample: counts describe the library, not market share. Monetary figures mix investment, revenue and user metrics — treat them as magnitude markers and defer to the verbatim description and source link.
Correction: headquarters relocated from Wuhan and Beijing to Singapore (mid-2025, following the Series B financing round), with the three co-founders relocating at the same time.
Original innovation: Manus was a phenomenon-level general-purpose AI agent product in 2025; after relocating, it uses Singapore as its global operations and compliance centre.
No primary local partner disclosed in this record.
Approximately 100 employees, mainly in Singapore (end of 2025); of the original China team of about 120, roughly 40 core technical staff relocated to Singapore, with the rest let go; on 30 December 2025, Meta announced an acquisition reportedly valued at US$2-3 billion; the deal was halted by China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on 27 April 2026; Meta announced the termination of the relationship on 15 June 2026.
Record note: The founding year has been verified as 2022 (the 'to be verified' flag has been resolved); other details remain the same as the original notes.
Compiled from public reporting and company disclosures. Not legal or investment advice — cite the source link alongside any quotation.
Other records in the same host country or AI segment, ranked by source reliability and year.
Singapore·Southeast Asia
Zhipu AI has prioritised Southeast Asia in its overseas expansion: it has established offices in Singapore and Malaysia, operates joint 'innovation centres' in Indonesia and Vietnam, and promotes localised sovereign AI agents to multiple national governments; its Hong Kong IPO prospectus confirms that the company is involved in building 'national- and city-level foundation model platforms' in Southeast Asia. In the first three quarters of 2025, revenue from private (on-premises) large-model deployments in Malaysia and Singapore was nearly RMB 18 million (approximately US$2.6 million), making these its only overseas private-deployment markets besides the United States.
The company operates its overseas business through two Singapore subsidiaries: Subsup Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202232608W, registered 14 September 2022, 8 Kaki Bukit Ave 4 #08-32), the developer entity for the AI companion app Talkie; and Nanonoble Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202410771D, registered 19 March 2024, 152 Beach Road #14-02 Gateway East), the operating entity for the text-to-video product Hailuo AI. In the first nine months of 2025, its AI-native products reached more than 200 countries and regions with over 212 million users; the prospectus revenue breakdown shows Singapore and the United States as its two primary overseas markets. It listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 9 January 2026, raising approximately US$619 million in actual proceeds (against a planned offering cap of US$539 million), with its share price nearly doubling on the first day of trading.
Singapore·Southeast Asia
Alibaba Cloud partnered with Singapore's national AI programme AI Singapore to build the regional multilingual model Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 (released November 2025) based on Tongyi Qwen3-32B: post-trained on more than 100 billion tokens of Southeast Asian language data, covering Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipino, Tamil, and other languages; it offers 4-bit/8-bit quantised versions that can run on consumer-grade laptops, is freely available via Hugging Face, and has topped the SEA-HELM leaderboard among open-source models of the same class.