China-headquartered digital media company Bytedance is looking to raise about RMB10bn ($1.44bn) for a corporate venture capital fund, The Information has reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company itself will provide RMB2bn of the capital while the remainder will be secured from external investors, in particular government-owned investment banks and funds, the sources said.
Bytedance’s two largest properties are news aggregation app Toutiao and TikTok, a short-form video sharing app with more than 500 million monthly active users. It agreed a $3bn investment by telecommunications group SoftBank at a $75bn valuation earlier this year.
Although it has not been as frequent an investor as some other large China-based tech corporates, Bytedance has nevertheless backed a few portfolio companies, predominantly in the digital media space.
Bytedance led a $25m round for India-based media aggregation app developer Dailyhunt in late 2016 and supplied $50m of series B capital for video streaming service Live.me in November 2017, before leading a $200m round for online education platform 17zuoye in March this year.
