35-year-old unknown creates the world's most valuable startup
Zhang Yiming, founder of Beijing ByteDance Technology Co, poses for a photograph at the company's headquarters in Beijing, China, on Thursday, Aug 17, 2017. The company is best known for a mobile app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets. - Bloomberg
HONG KONG: When Zhang Yiming first shopped the idea of a news aggregation app powered by artificial intelligence six years ago, investors including Sequoia Capital were skeptical.
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 Ltd and extract profit where even Google had failed.
Zhang, now 35, proved them wrong. Today his company, Bytedance Ltd, is on its way to a more than US$75bil valuation - a price tag that surpasses Uber Technologies Inc to top the world, according to CB Insights. The latest in a long line of investors who’ve come around is Softbank Group Corp, which is said to be planning to invest about US$1.5bil.
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