Yichao “Peak” Ji

In March this year, Yichao “Peak” Ji appeared in a launch video that quickly went viral. Speaking in fluent English, the 32-year-old introduced Manus—an AI agent developed by Chinese startup Butterfly Effect. It’s built on top of various models, including Anthropic’s Claude.

“This isn’t just another chatbot or workflow,” Ji says in the video. “It’s a truly autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution.”

As AI agents become Silicon Valley’s latest obsession, what sets Manus apart is its promise of true autonomy. Most agents require constant supervision, but Manus is designed to operate independently—navigating tasks, adapting mid-process, and even responding to new instructions without needing a restart. Users can close their laptops and come back to completed work.

Within a week of its debut, Manus attracted a waiting list of around 2 million users. The hype quickly translated into funding: A $75 million round brought Butterfly Effect’s valuation to around $500 million. The launch energized China’s startup scene and drew attention to a wave of AI applications emerging from the country.

Ji’s approach is rooted in years of building tools that combine technical depth with real-world usability. A longtime open-source contributor and product obsessive, he has been shipping software since high school—most notably Mammoth, an iPhone browser that briefly became the most downloaded of its kind in China. In his early 20s, he secured backing from Sequoia Capital and ZhenFund to launch Peak Labs, where he developed Magi, a knowledge search engine powered by a custom language model. It’s inspired by frontier AI research and constructs knowledge graphs, a “mind map” showing interconnected knowledge.

But Ji stands out not just for his products but also for what he represents: a new generation of Chinese technologists who are global in outlook, steeped in open-source culture, and fluent in both technical architecture and product vision.

Now based in Singapore, Ji is part of a new wave of founders building world-class AI from outside the traditional US tech hubs. Manus itself is a product of global fluidity—developed by a Chinese team, powered by US models, and designed for a worldwide user base.