Kuaishou, a Chinese live-streaming app backed by Tencent, Baidu and Sequoia, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of as much as $25 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions. That would be up from $18 billion in an earlier fundraising round.
The fundraising is the latest shot in a multibillion-dollar arms race among Chinese video-streaming apps. Kuaishou, which features short videos of China’s working class and farmers broadcasting snippets of their own lives, is competing against apps like ByteDance Technology’s Douyin, also called TikTok. ByteDance, which also owns popular news app Toutiao, just raised $3 billion at a valuation of $75 billion from investors such as SoftBank. Kuaishou declined to comment.
