General Atlantic eyes $2B round for China's Kling AI at $18B valuation
What's the deal? General Atlantic is in talks to lead the first outside funding round for Kling AIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the video-generation arm of Chinese tech group Kuaishou. Kling is seeking more than $2B at an $18B valuation, ahead of a planned IPO that could come as early as 2027. The company had initially aimed for a $20B valuation but trimmed the target to match investor appetite.
Kuaishou's Hong Kong shares jumped as much as 8.9% on the news. Talks are at an early stage, and both parties declined to comment.
Why now? Kling turns text prompts into short videos — a space the West has largely ceded since OpenAI shut down its rival product Sora earlier this year. Kling is racing to fill that gap alongside ByteDance's SeedanceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and startup Shengshu.
The business is growing fast. Annual recurring revenue hit about $500M in March, up from $300M in January after the launch of Kling 3.0. First-quarter revenue topped 650M yuan (around $96M), more than triple the year-earlier figure. Kuaishou is weighing plans to carve Kling out as a separate company.
What could go wrong? The risk is political, not technical. Beijing has been tightening its grip on cross-border AI investment. In April, it ordered Meta to unwind a $2B takeover of Chinese-founded AI startup Manus over fears of losing key technology. Since then, China has told leading AI firms to refuse US capital without prior clearance and placed travel restrictions on top AI researchers.
A US private-equity firm buying into a Chinese AI champion runs directly into that current. There is no guarantee the deal closes on these terms — or at all.
The signal: This deal is a litmus test for how far US money can still reach into Chinese AI. General Atlantic made early bets on Meta and Uber and previously backed ByteDance, but a fresh wager on Chinese generative AI is far rarer now. Kling leads a market segment with few Western competitors, and the appetite from US investors is clearly there. Whether Beijing lets the capital in is the open question — and the answer will shape cross-border AI investment for years to come.
Read more: The Next Web
