Founded in 2012 by tech entrepreneur Yiming Zhang, ByteDance quickly launched a suite of apps beginning that same year with Neihan Duanzi, a platform where users shared jokes in the form of short videos, memes and written posts. ByteDance has also been accused of using apps like TikTok to employ intrusive data-gathering techniques. In 2022 Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker-White claimed that she had been spied on and tracked by ByteDance after writing an article critical of TikTok. Company officials initially rebuffed these claims but later admitted that their employees had obtained data from American TikTok users, including journalists and those connected to them. According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track an internal mole at the company who was thought to be in contact with reporters.
- It only has 100,000 downloads compared to TikTok’s more than one billion.
- However, the technical paper provides some noteworthy details that are worth going over now and in advance of whenever they are made available.
- Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that ByteDance was exploring a music streaming service with a subscription option and ad-supported free tier.
- But ByteDance has found ways to get the computing power it needs to train its systems – in part by using data centres outside China and most likely, analysts say, by buying chips made by Chinese chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon.
The standalone Lark app for iOS and Android is described as a “team collaboration” app, which, for all intents and purposes, means its basically a Microsoft Teams or Slack competitor. Lark has features like in-app messaging and video calling, as well as collaborative document sharing. Despite the company’s grandiose success, ByteDance has faced international scrutiny as a result of accusations that the company imposes censorship in favour of the Chinese government. For example, users have accused the company of deleting articles on BaBe that were critical of the Chinese government. In 2019 TikTok user Feroza Aziz’s account was suspended after she posted a video criticizing the Chinese government’s mass detention of Uyghur Muslims.
Product
Despite facing challenges, ByteDance’s relentless pursuit of innovation continues to drive its growth and influence in the tech world. Increased regulatory barriers were also introduced against the company because of tensions between the United States and China. National security concerns about the collection of user data led the U.S. government to ban the app from being installed on government-issued devices. Legislation was also introduced that could lead to a national ban of the platform altogether. In 2016 ByteDance released the video-sharing app Douyin, exclusively for users in China. The popularity of Douyin in China inspired the team to develop TikTok for international audiences.
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It’s the first of the ByteDance apps to return to app stores since the ban. ByteDance’s success is driven by its AI and machine learning algorithms, which form the core of its content recommendation systems. These technologies analyze user behavior to deliver highly personalized content, making apps like TikTok and Douyin incredibly engaging.
What it means for technical leaders, data engineers and enterprise decision-makers
TikTok Lite is not that popular, especially when compared to TikTok proper. It only has 100,000 downloads compared to TikTok’s more than one billion. It wasn’t a part of the ban discussion, but it’s currently off the Play Store nonetheless. However, a spokesperson for ByteDance said that it is not working on a smartphone — but it is developing other hardware related to education.
Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan. ByteDance is reportedly exploring a whole host of new areas that could unlock new monetization potential. It’s looking to expand beyond those services to potentially new areas like smartphones, as it looks for further growth areas — but analysts said that could be a tough task. We believe at ByteDance that high ethical standards and a culture of integrity play a pivotal role throughout the development of the company.
- Similarly, there’s TikTok Shop Seller Center, an app for users who sell products on TikTok to manage their digital shops.
- Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.
- To be clear, this partnership was between the two companies to hash out a next-gen VR headset, which would likely take the fight directly to Meta and its Quest series.
- ByteDance is part of a growing number of Chinese companies setting its sights on overseas markets including the U.S.
- ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around US$225bil (RM1.05 trillion), according to market intelligence firm CP Insights.
That 1 percent stake also came with a board seat in ByteDance’s Chinese entity, tech news website The Information reported in 2021. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. A US trading firm reportedly owns 15% of TikTok-owner ByteDance, a stake potentially worth more than $15 billion.
On April 4, US President Donald Trump extended a looming deadline by 75 days into mid-June. A large number of US lawmakers – Republicans and Democrats – are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China. TikTok has said around 60% of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock. The Chinese company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world. Seed-Thinking-v1.5 consistently outperformed DeepSeek R1 across sessions, reinforcing its applicability to real-world user needs. To support efficient large-scale training, ByteDance built a system atop its HybridFlow framework.
Products
ByteDance, Chinese technology company that developed novel video-sharing social networking applications, most notably TikTok. ByteDance also serves as the parent company of several popular social media and news apps. ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people’s lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok.
In March, its subsidiary Lark Technologies launched a product called Lark, a productivity and workplace collaboration tool. Jeff Yass’ Susquehanna International Group and Bill Ford’s General Atlantic, both of which are represented on ByteDance’s board, are leading discussions with the White House on the plan, the sources said. A large number of US lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China. When asked during a US congressional hearing in March last year if a Chinese official was on the Beijing ByteDance Technology board, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said “I believe so”. ByteDance’s founders have a 20 percent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok.
“Although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, describing the bill as “bullying”. The company says it now routes all of its US traffic through infrastructure in the United States, and that it is deleting previously collected data. It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data.
TikTok’s CEO best forex indicator in the world has told Congress that the firm has never been asked by the Chinese government for US user data nor has it provided it. Company job postings show that ByteDance is hiring for hundreds of AI-related roles. ByteDance is also using the data as the linchpin of a growing business in artificial intelligence (AI). The company has invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure needed to power AI systems, building vast data centres in China and South-east Asia and buying up advanced semiconductors. In a way, perhaps there’s merit behind these rumors, as during MWC 2025, Qualcomm and ByteDance announced a partnership that was more than we expected. To be clear, this partnership was between the two companies to hash out a next-gen VR headset, which would likely take the fight directly to Meta and its Quest series.
170 million of those users happen to be in the U.S., which makes you wonder how a looming ban of the app will affect TikTok’s bottom line. Since then, all the apps on this list have been removed from app stores, and while most allow you to use them if you already had the app on your phone, only one has been added back to marketplaces. ByteDance is part of a growing number of Chinese companies setting its sights on overseas markets including the U.S. From its birth in a Beijing apartment 12 years ago, ByteDance grew into one of the world’s biggest tech firms — best known in most countries as the creator of TikTok. A privately held firm, ByteDance does not release revenue and profit figures, but media estimates of its earnings put it on par with some of the biggest firms in the world. The project also draws on previous mba asap 10 minutes to: understanding corporate finance efforts, such as Doubao 1.5 Pro, and incorporates shared techniques in RLHF and data curation.
What is ByteDance?
In the year 2006, Yimimg became the fifth employee and first engineer at the travel website Kuxun. In hitbtc exchange review 2008, Yiming joined Microsoft, however found it tough to cope up with the company rules of Microsoft which made him leave Microsoft to join Fanfou (Twitter clone in China). In 2009, Fanfou was shut down owing to certain controversies, and that very year, Yiming started his very first startup 99fang.com, which is a real estate search portal. Meanwhile, smartphones began to take over and more and more people started using smartphones, and Yiming could very well see the opportunity underlying it, which made him leave 99fang.com to start ByteDance in 2012. Like other “lite” apps, this one is designed for phones with limited RAM, data, or unstable connections. TikTok has become a world-wide phenomenon, capturing the attentions of one billion users.
Launch of first apps
This technology is the key to the success of its products, offering a customized feed that keeps users engaged for longer periods. All this spending has helped ByteDance make one of the most popular AI apps in China. Its chatbot, Doubao, gained 60 million users within its first three months on the market in 2024.
Despite this reassurance, the U.S. state of Montana passed a law to ban the app in the state. It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia. ByteDance also launched Toutiao, a news aggregation app which uses algorithms to suggest articles and videos to users, in 2012. It’s one of the largest news aggregation apps in China and is installed on over 250 million monthly unique devices, according to data from Chinese market research firm, iResearch.