ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is looking to raise $2 billion in a funding round that will value the company at a massive $180 billion, a report by Reuters states. According to people familiar with the matter, the company is eyeing existing investors General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital for this round.
The valuation, if true, will mean that the company has grown at an exponential rate in the past few months. According to a report by Financial times that emerged in March this year, the company was valued at just about $90-$100 billion at that time, which means that it has doubled up in valuation in just a few months.
Reuters also reported that this will not be a pre IPO round, as ByteDance has still not decided if it wants to list Douyin as a separate entity, or include it in a larger IPO, which includes some of its Chinese operations including Douyin and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
This round, if conducted, will convolute the future of TikTok even more, as the app struggles to win the confidence of governments around the world. After TikTok faced a ban in its biggest market-India, in early summer, ByteDance was to ready to face a ban in US as well, in September, with TikTok seeing a departure from the country. However, talks about a new entity called TikTok Global started surfacing, which would be the result of deal between Walmart and Oracle and ByteDance.
TikTok Global has not been mentioned for a long time now, and the future of the app in US is still unknown. This might be mostly due to a huge confusion that arose when both parties involved had a different story to tell about the ownership structure of the new company.
With this new investment round, the structure of the TikTok Global, which is already very precarious, can change.
