Kuaishou’s AI ace valued at $18 billion as countdown to spinoff begins

The short video giant is preparing to cut the financial cord with its Kling unit, opening up new valuation room for the popular AI video asset

Key Takeaways:

• Kuaishou is promoting financial independence for Kling, with outside investors set to inject up to 20.45 billion yuan into the AI video unit to better gage its value
• Terms of Kling’s financing include a listing deadline, indicating expectation for a separate IPO for the company

By Lee Shih Ta

AI can do amazing things, but those things also come with huge costs. That combination is leading some companies to separately capitalize their AI business, insulating parents from constantly needing to pump new funds into their AI offspring.

Short-video and livestreaming e-commerce platform Kuaishou Technology (1024.HK) is the latest to take that approach, as it pushes its Kling AI video generation platform into the capital markets. The business, which generates short videos using text or image prompts, is being restructured into an entity that can be independently financed and valued, and could even be separately listed.

Kuaishou unveiled that roadmap earlier this month, including a new financing plan for Kling. Under the plan, announced July 2, a group of initial investors will inject 13.8 billion yuan ($2.04 billion) into Beijing Keling Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd., Kling’s formal business entity, under a capital increase agreement. The same day, 15 more investors committed to injecting another 5.22 billion yuan into the company, bringing the total capital increase to 20.45 billion yuan.

External investors will hold about 16.67% of the company after the capital infusion. Kuaishou’s stake in Kling will fall from 100% to about 68.33% after adding in impact from a concurrent share incentive plan. That allows Kuaishou to continue consolidating Kling’s results into its own financial statements.

The announcement said the restructuring will allow investors to “independently and clearly assess” Kling’s performance and potential. Put differently, the move lets Kuaishou separate its AI video assets from its older video platform for better independent valuation.

Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu were among the new investors, Reuters reported. The Wall Street Journal said the financing valued Kling at about $18 billion. An annualization of Kling’s March revenue of about $500 million gives the AI video unit a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of about 36 times – far higher than figure of slightly over 1 for Kuaishou.

The announcement disclosed that Kling’s pro forma 2025 revenue totaled about 1.1 billion yuan. But reflecting its rapid growth, revenue for the first quarter of this year alone exceeded 650 million yuan, up more than 300% year-on-year and already more than half of revenue for all 2025.

That demonstrates Kling’s big commercial potential, unlike many AI companies that are still struggling to build up their business. That said, AI video generation remains a capital-intensive and computing power-intensive business. Kling’s net asset value at the end of 2025 was a negative 9 million yuan, and its net losses for 2024 and 2025 stood at 500 million yuan and 1.9 billion yuan, respectively.

From a broader perspective, Kling’s scale looks somewhat limited. Kuaishou’s total revenue for the first quarter of this year was 33.7 billion yuan, meaning Kling’s 650 million yuan accounted for less than 2% of the total. While Kling is growing quickly, it could still be some time before it contributes enough to have a meaningful impact on Kuaishou’s fundamentals.

Startup qualities

For Kuaishou’s shareholders, Kling’s independent financing also brings equity dilution. That dilution could grow if Kling continues to raise more money by bringing in new investors or listing in the future, meaning the benefits from Kling’s growing value will increasingly flow to others besides Kuaishou.

The financing includes a repurchase clause, stipulating that if Kling fails to complete an IPO before Oct. 30, 2031, or if it fails to satisfy other conditions within a specified timeframe, investors are entitled to a refund at the original investment price, plus 8% annual interest. That indicates that Kuaishou is already eyeing a separate listing for Kling over the next five years.

Kling’s equity incentive arrangement is also worth a closer look, allowing for up to 15% of its enlarged share capital to be distributed as incentives. Additionally, CEO Gai Kun was granted a 3% equity reward and enjoys 10 times the voting rights for a maximum of 4% of his stake. Such a model closely resembles that of a startup to ensure that Kling can retain its top management and core team.

Four days after the financing, Kuaishou announced that 273 million of its Class B shares were sold by major stakeholder Tencent through off-exchange block trades. Tencent sold the stock for HK$43.25 per share, cashing out approximately HK$11.8 billion ($1.51 billion), which reduced its Kuaishou holdings from 15.68% to 9.37%.

But Tencent remains an active investor in the Kuaishou system through participation in the Kling financing through its Shanghai Qishan Investment Co. Ltd. and Parallel Mars Investment Ltd. units, which each invested about 682 million yuan. Thus, the share sale and concurrent new investment are the equivalent of Tencent shifting funds from a mature platform business to a newer AI asset with better growth potential.

Kuaishou’s stock briefly rose by nearly 7% after the initial announcement of the Kling financing, but later gave back the gains and ultimately closed unchanged that day. But news of Tencent’s stake reduction sparked a selloff that saw the stock plunge by 12% in one day, marking its largest single-day drop since late March. In response, Kuaishou announced it would repurchase 175 million Class B shares for HK$8.35 billion, while concurrently emphasizing it will fully implement the remainder of its current share repurchase quota.

Kling’s restructuring also reflects an emerging new capital logic from internet companies in the AI era. Their mature main businesses provide the cash flow, data, and usage scenarios, while the AI subsidiary raises external capital and gets valued separately, offering the type of employee equity incentives often seen in startups.

All this raises a key question for Kuaishou investors. After high-growth AI assets are priced independently, exactly how much value remains within the listed company’s core business? For Kuaishou, the ultimate test is whether Kling can find a commercial model able to cover its massive computing power and development costs in a space where AI giants are continually challenging technological thresholds. Whether Kling can become Kuaishou’s next growth engine, or simply becomes another cash-burning black hole, is a core question that will only become clear as this restructuring story unfolds.

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