A US investor wants to buy into China’s most successful AI-video company. The timing could hardly be more awkward.
General Atlantic is in talks to lead the first outside funding round for Kling AI, the video arm of Chinese tech group Kuaishou, Bloomberg reported. Kling is seeking more than $2bn at a valuation of $18bn, ahead of a planned stock-market listing. It had aimed for $20bn, but trimmed the target to match investor appetite. Kuaishou’s Hong Kong shares jumped as much as 8.9 per cent on the news.
A rare, and risky, US bet on Chinese AI
For General Atlantic, this would be a bold move. The firm made early bets on Meta and Uber, and backed Kling’s much larger rival, ByteDance, years ago. A fresh wager on Chinese generative AI is far rarer now, and far riskier.
The danger is political, not technical. In April, Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its $2bn takeover of the Chinese-founded AI startup Manus, over fears of losing key technology to a rival. China has gone further since. It has told leading AI firms to refuse US capital without prior clearance, and placed travel curbs on its top AI researchers. A US firm buying into a Chinese AI champion now runs straight into that current.
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Talks are at an early stage, and there is no guarantee a deal lands on these terms. General Atlantic and Kuaishou both declined to comment.
Filling the hole Sora left
Kling turns text prompts into short films, much as OpenAI’s Sora once did. OpenAI shut Sora down earlier this year, and Kling is racing to fill the gap. It is one of a cluster of Chinese AI-video tools chasing global users, alongside ByteDance’s Seedance and the startup Shengshu.
The business is growing fast, at least on paper. Bloomberg reports Kling’s annual recurring revenue reached about $500mn in March, up from $300mn in January after the launch of Kling 3.0. First-quarter revenue topped 650mn yuan, around $96mn, more than triple a year earlier. Kuaishou is weighing a plan to carve Kling out as a separate company, with The Information reporting an IPO targeted for 2027.
Why it matters
The deal, if it happens, is a test of how far US money can still reach into Chinese AI. Kling leads a field the West has largely ceded, and General Atlantic clearly wants in. The open question is whether Beijing will let it.