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TikTok owner Bytedance is now the world's most valuable startup
A new $3 billion round of investment led by SoftBank has crowned China's Bytedance the world's most valuable startup, Bloomberg reports. Bytedance, the owner of popular karaoke video app TikTok and huge Chinese news aggregator Toutiao, is now valued at $75 billion, which takes it past Uber's most recent figure of $72 billion.
Uber is reported to be considering an IPO for next year that would value it at $120 billion, but for now Bytedance is on top, which is a huge achievement for a company that until recently had very little presence outside China. TikTok, which was acquired as Musical.ly and merged into Bytedance's own Douyin service as TikTok, is a major sensation among teens in the West, and has apparently already achieved the social media rite of passage of having Facebook attempt to clone it.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday October 30 2018, @04:06PM
They are responsible for a constant stream of spam across the internet. All TikTok does is grab other peoples videos, slap their watermark on them, and spam them to social media.
3 billion? Investing in pure hype with no substance. Seems standard practice.
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