ByteDance


ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing. Its associated variable-interest entity ByteDance Ltd is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing app TikTok/Douyin. The company is also the developer of the news platform Toutiao, the video-editing app CapCut, and Lemon8 which is a video sharing mobile app.
ByteDance has attracted regulatory and media attention in several countries over security, surveillance, and censorship concerns.

History

In 2009, software engineer and entrepreneur Zhang Yiming collaborated with his friend Liang Rubo to co-found 99fang.com, a real estate search engine. In early 2012, the pair rented an apartment in Zhongguancun and, along with several other 99fang employees, began developing an app that would use big data algorithms to classify news according to users' preferences, which would later become Toutiao. That March, Yiming and Liang founded ByteDance.

Launch of first apps

In March 2012, ByteDance launched its first app, called Neihan Duanzi. This allowed users to circulate jokes, memes, and humorous videos. Before being forced by the Chinese government to shut down in 2018, Neihan Duanzi had over 200 million users.
In August 2012, ByteDance launched the first version of news and content platform Toutiao, which would become their core product.
In January 2013, in an attempt for commercialism and nationalism, a four-part plan for the future was presented to executives. Part four of the plan was to build an English version of Toutiao to gain users in English-speaking countries. At the time, there was an app race for video views and the attention of phone users.

2016 to present

In March 2016, ByteDance established its research arm, called the ByteDance AI Lab. It is headed by Wei-Ying Ma, the former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia.
From late 2016 until 2017, ByteDance made a number of acquisitions and new product launches. In December 2016, it invested in the Indonesian news recommendation platform BABE. Two months later, in February 2017, ByteDance acquired Flipagram, which was later rebranded to Vigo Video in July 2017. Vigo Video later shut down permanently on 31 October 2020. In November 2017, ByteDance acquired musical.ly for an estimated US$1 billion. At the time of acquisition, TikTok was only available in India and musical.ly was available globally. In order for TikTok to go global, ByteDance merged musical.ly with TikTok on 2 August 2018, keeping the name TikTok. Another notable acquisition includes News Republic from Cheetah Mobile in November 2017.
Since 2018, ByteDance has been in litigation with Tencent. ByteDance and its affiliates brought a series of unfair competition lawsuits against Tencent, alleging that Tencent was blocking their content. As of at least early 2024, these lawsuits had not reached resolution, largely due to disputes about jurisdiction. Tencent filed two lawsuits against ByteDance and its affiliates, alleging that they were using WeChat and QQ profiles without authorization and illegally crawling data from public WeChat accounts. Tencent obtained an injunction barring ByteDance from this practice.
In December 2018, ByteDance sued Chinese technology news site Huxiu for defamation after Huxiu reported that ByteDance-owned Indian news app Helo was propagating fake news.
In March 2021, the Financial Times reported that ByteDance was part of a group of Chinese companies that aimed to deploy technology to circumvent Apple's privacy policies.
In April 2021, ByteDance announced that it had created a new division called BytePlus to distribute the software framework underlying TikTok, so that others may launch similar apps.
In August 2021, ByteDance acquired Pico, an Oculus-like virtual reality startup.
In June 2022, the Financial Times reported on a culture clash at ByteDance's London office that has led to a staff exodus.
In March 2023, The ''Wall Street Journal'' reported that former employees allege that the company engages in a practice called "horse racing", in which several teams are assigned to build the same product. When one version is deemed to perform better, the team designing the better version is provided with more support.
In April 2023, ByteDance filed a trademark for a book publisher called 8th Note Press.
In December 2023, The Verge reported that ByteDance used OpenAI's API for its own generative AI projects. Afterwards, OpenAI announced that while usage by ByteDance was minimal, its account has been suspended pending further investigation whether any terms of service were violated. ByteDance stated that it had been licensed for using the API outside the Chinese market, its own chatbot is available only within China, and ChatGPT-generated data have been deleted from ByteDance's training data since the middle of 2023. Scraping existing AI models is a common shortcut for smaller companies but considered unusual for the likes of ByteDance.
In May 2024, ByteDance laid off "a large percentage" of the 1,000 employees from its global user operations, content, and marketing teams. The global user operations team was disbanded, and remaining employees were reassigned.
In June 2024, ByteDance launched an image-sharing and social networking service called Whee.
In February 2025, ByteDance displayed OmniHuman-1, an AI system which can create realistic videos from a single image combined with motion signals such as audio or video clips. OmniHuman-1 is not available for public use.

Corporate affairs

Funding and ownership

ByteDance is backed financially by Jeff Yass's Susquehanna International Group, Primavera Capital Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group., it was estimated to be valued at $300 billion.
ByteDance's owners include investors outside of China, its founders and Chinese investors, and employees. In 2021, the state-owned China Internet Investment Fund purchased a 1% stake in ByteDance's main Chinese subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology, as a golden share investment and seated Wu Shugang, a government official with a background in government propaganda, as one of the subsidiary's board members.
In 2023, G42 purchased a stake in ByteDance.

Management

Zhang Yiming was ByteDance's chairman and CEO from its founding in 2012 until 2021, when co-founder Liang Rubo took over as CEO.
On 19 May 2020, ByteDance and Disney released an announcement that Kevin Mayer, head of Disney's streaming business, would join ByteDance. From June 2020 to his resignation 26 August 2020, Mayer was the CEO of TikTok and the COO of ByteDance, reporting directly to the company CEO Zhang Yiming. In 2021, Shou Zi Chew, former CFO of Xiaomi, took over as TikTok CEO.
In 2014, ByteDance established an internal Chinese Communist Party committee. The company's vice president, Zhang Fuping, is the company's CCP Committee Secretary. According to a report submitted to the Australian Parliament, Zhang Fuping stated that ByteDance should "transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line."

Board of Directors

As of November 2024, the company's board consisted of the following directors:
ByteDance has a strategic partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts. The partnership also said that ByteDance would work with the Ministry of Public Security in cooperation on unspecified "offline activities".
In 2018, ByteDance helped to establish the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, an initiative backed by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Beijing municipal government.
In 2019, ByteDance formed joint ventures with Beijing Time, a publisher controlled by the Beijing municipal CCP committee, and with Shanghai Dongfang, a state media firm in Shanghai. In 2021, ByteDance announced that its partnership with Shanghai Dongfang had never been in operation and was disbanded.
In June 2022, ByteDance partnered with Shanghai United Media Group to launch a plan to develop domestic and foreign influencers.
On 1 December 2025, ByteDance announced the launch of their AI voice assistant which will be made available in Chinese smartphones. The artificial intelligence voice control tool will first debut on ZTE's Nubia M153 handset, and will be powered by ByteDance's Doubao large language model.

Lobbying and political ad campaigns

According to disclosures filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, ByteDance has lobbied the United States Congress, White House, Department of Commerce, Department of State, and the Department of Defense. Bills targeted include the United States Innovation and Competition Act, American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the annual National Defense Authorization Act, and the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
ByteDance's American lobbying team is led by Michael Beckerman and includes former US Senators Trent Lott and John Breaux as well as former US Representatives Jeff Denham, Bart Gordon and Joe Crowley. The company has hired K&L Gates, LGL Advisors, and other firms.
ByteDance spent more than $17.7 million on lobbying from its first report in 2019 up to July 2023, and its 2023 lobbying expense added up to $8.7 million.
In March 2024, ByteDance responded to ad campaigns by anti-TikTok advocacy groups calling to ban the app by launching its own $2.1 million marketing campaign across swing states that had vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election.