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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

TikTok owner Bytedance is now the world's most valuable startup [theverge.com]

A new $3 billion round of investment led by SoftBank has crowned China's Bytedance the world's most valuable startup, Bloomberg reports [bloomberg.com]. 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 [wsj.com] 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 [theverge.com], 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 [theverge.com].

ByteDance [wikipedia.org]. Tik Tok [youtube.com]?

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