Kling, a Chinese video artificial intelligence model company, has raised approximately 4.67 trillion won in investment. It is the second-largest funding round across China's entire generative AI market this year, after DeepSeek's 11 trillion won. During this investment process, Kling was valued at about $18 billion (approximately 27.54 trillion won), rising to the highest level in the world among standalone video AI model companies. Kling has gained recognition for its business-to-business (B2B) revenue model, and attention is focused on whether it can maintain its leadership despite counterattacks from rivals such as Seedance.
According to local media outlet Jiemian News on Wednesday, Kling's parent company Kuaishou announced through a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing on the 2nd that it would raise up to $3 billion (approximately 4.67 trillion won) in external funds through a third-party allotment of new shares. A total of $2.8 billion has been raised so far, and once the funding is complete, Kuaishou's stake in Kling will fall from 100% to 68.33%.
This investment is a pre-IPO round in which Kuaishou will spin off Kling and begin the process of listing on the Hong Kong stock market within 12 months. Kuaishou has set a put option right allowing investors to sell back shares at their initial purchase price plus 8% annual interest if the IPO is not completed before October 30, 2031.
The $3 billion investment is the second-largest single round in China's generative AI sector this year, after DeepSeek (approximately $7.3 billion). In particular, it is the largest when looking only at video generation AI models, according to the company. The total corporate valuation is estimated at about $18 billion, approaching 80% of parent company Kuaishou's market capitalization (approximately $23.5 billion), and overwhelmingly exceeds rivals such as U.S.-based Runway (approximately $5.3 billion) and Pika Labs (approximately $1 billion). However, direct valuation comparisons are difficult, as competitors such as Google's Veo and Seedance, operated by ByteDance, run as internal business units.
Kling, along with Seedance, is considered one of the two leading powers in Chinese video AI. Driven by viral content such as a dancing dog and a ballpark goddess, its global user count surpassed 100 million as of last month.
About 70% of revenue comes from overseas subscriptions and application programming interface (API) calls targeting 50,000 corporate clients. In particular, it is rated as being ahead of Seedance in performance areas valued in the B2B domain, such as image consistency. Goldman Sachs also assessed that while Seedance has strong technology, Kling has more of an edge for commercial use. First-quarter revenue this year exceeded 650 million yuan (approximately 146.5 billion won), up more than 300% from the same period a year earlier.
With this investment, Kling has secured the ammunition to take on its biggest rival, Seedance. The participation of China's three major big tech firms — Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent — in the Kling investment is also seen by analysts as an intent to prevent Seedance from monopolizing the video AI market early. In particular, Alibaba Cloud poured in 1.363 billion yuan, the second-largest amount among disclosed external investors.
However, there are also considerable concerns. Kuaishou plans capital expenditures of 26 billion yuan this year, most of which will be spent on infrastructure investment needed for Kling's services. The $3 billion (approximately 21.5 billion yuan) secured this time falls short of even one year's worth of the investment plan. By contrast, Seedance's parent company ByteDance plans to invest 200 billion yuan (45 trillion won) in its overall AI infrastructure this year alone. Alibaba, which invested a massive amount in Kling, also recruited a figure who once served as Kling's CEO to develop the video AI model "Happy Horse."
