ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company based in Haidian, Beijing. Its associated variable interest entity, ByteDance Ltd, is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing app TikTok/Douyin. The company is also the developer of the news platform Toutiao, the video-editing app CapCut, and Lemon8 which is a video sharing mobile app. Furthermore, the company develops generative AI models both for the Chinese and international markets.
ByteDance has attracted regulatory and media attention in several countries over security, surveillance, cybersecurity, and censorship concerns.
In 2009, software engineer and entrepreneur Zhang Yiming collaborated with his friend Liang Rubo to co-found 99fang.com, a real estate search engine. In early 2012, the pair rented an apartment in Zhongguancun and, along with several other 99fang employees, began developing an app that would use big data algorithms to classify news according to users' preferences, which would later become Toutiao. That March, Yiming and Liang founded ByteDance.
In March 2012, ByteDance launched its first app, called Neihan Duanzi (内涵段子, lit. "profound gags"). This allowed users to circulate jokes, memes, and humorous videos. Before being forced by the Chinese government to shut down in 2018, Neihan Duanzi had over 200 million users.
In August 2012, ByteDance launched the first version of news and content platform Toutiao (头条, lit. "headlines"), which would become their core product.
In January 2013, in an attempt for commercialism and nationalism, a four-part plan for the future was presented to executives. Part four of the plan was to build an English version of Toutiao to gain users in English-speaking countries. At the time, there was an app race for video views and the attention of phone users.
In March 2016, ByteDance established its research arm, called the ByteDance AI Lab. It is headed by Wei-Ying Ma, the former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia.
From late 2016 until 2017, ByteDance made a number of acquisitions and new product launches. In December 2016, it invested in the Indonesian news recommendation platform BABE. Two months later, in February 2017, ByteDance acquired Flipagram, which was later rebranded to Vigo Video (Hypstar) in July 2017. Vigo Video later shut down permanently on 31 October 2020. In November 2017, ByteDance acquired musical.ly for an estimated US$1 billion. At the time of acquisition, TikTok was only available in India and musical.ly was available globally. In order for TikTok to go global, ByteDance merged musical.ly with TikTok on 2 August 2018, keeping the name TikTok. Another notable acquisition includes News Republic from Cheetah Mobile in November 2017.
Since 2018, ByteDance has been in litigation with Tencent. ByteDance and its affiliates brought a series of unfair competition lawsuits against Tencent, alleging that Tencent was blocking their content. As of at least early 2024, these lawsuits had not reached resolution, largely due to disputes about jurisdiction. Tencent filed two lawsuits against ByteDance and its affiliates, alleging that they were using WeChat and QQ profiles without authorization and illegally crawling data from public WeChat accounts. Tencent obtained an injunction barring ByteDance from this practice.
In December 2018, ByteDance sued Chinese technology news site Huxiu for defamation after Huxiu reported that ByteDance-owned Indian news app Helo was propagating fake news.
In March 2021, the Financial Times reported that ByteDance was part of a group of Chinese companies that aimed to deploy technology to circumvent Apple's privacy policies.
In April 2021, ByteDance announced that it had created a new division called BytePlus to distribute the software framework underlying TikTok, so that others may launch similar apps.
In August 2021, ByteDance acquired Pico, an Oculus-like virtual reality startup.
In June 2022, the Financial Times reported on a culture clash at ByteDance's London office that has led to a staff exodus.
In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that former employees allege that the company engages in a practice called "horse racing", in which several teams are assigned to build the same product. When one version is deemed to perform better, the team designing the better version is provided with more support.
In April 2023, ByteDance filed a trademark for a book publisher called 8th Note Press.
ByteDance's AI team known as "Seed" was established in 2023. Its chatbot app Doubao was launched in August 2023. In December 2023, The Verge reported that ByteDance used OpenAI's API for its own generative AI projects. Afterwards, OpenAI announced that while usage by ByteDance was minimal, its account has been suspended pending further investigation whether any terms of service were violated. ByteDance stated that it had been licensed for using the API outside the Chinese market, its own chatbot is available only within China, and ChatGPT-generated data have been deleted from ByteDance's training data since the middle of 2023. Scraping existing AI models is a common shortcut for smaller companies but considered unusual for the likes of ByteDance.