Meet the 35-year-old Chinese software engineer behind ByteDance, the world’s most valuable start-up
By nurturing a raft of successful apps, ByteDance has gathered a force of hundreds of millions of users and now poses a threat to China’s largest internet companies
When Zhang Yiming first shopped the idea of a news aggregation app powered by artificial intelligence six years ago, investors including Sequoia Capital were sceptical.
Back then, the question was how a 29-year-old locally trained software engineer could outsmart the numerous news portals operated by the likes of social media behemoth Tencent Holdings and extract profit where even Google had failed.
Zhang, now 35, proved them wrong. Today his company, ByteDance, is on its way to a more than US$75 billion valuation – a price tag that surpasses Uber Technologies to top the world, according to CB Insights. The latest in a long line of investors who have come around is Softbank Group Corp, which is said to be planning to invest about US$1.5 billion
ByteDance now counts KKR & Co, General Atlantic and even Sequoia as backers. Much of its lofty valuation stems from the creation of an internet experience that is a cross between Google and Facebook.
“The most important thing is that we are not a news business. We are more like a search business or a social media platform,” Zhang said in a 2017 interview, adding that he employs no editors or reporters. “We are doing very innovative work. We are not a copycat of a US company, both in product and technology.”