A generative video business goes looking for public money
Kling AI, the video generation unit of the Chinese short-video company Kuaishou, has picked China International Capital Corporation, Goldman Sachs and UBS to work on a Hong Kong initial public offering that could raise at least $1 billion, Bloomberg reported on 6 October. The listing could come as soon as next year.
The report is sourced to people familiar with the matter. Kuaishou has not commented. Its shares rose 2% on the news.
Private money came first, and came in size
Kling is not short of capital. Bloomberg’s reporting puts a July round at $2.8 billion on a pre-money valuation of around $15 billion, with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu among the investors — three of the four largest Chinese platform companies backing a unit of a fourth.
That is the detail that makes a listing interesting rather than routine. A business that can raise $2.8 billion privately at $15 billion does not need a public market for the money. What a listing provides is a price, a liquidity path for those investors, and a public set of accounts for a generative video business — of which there are currently almost none anywhere.
Video generation is becoming a market with incumbents
Kling has spent 2026 as one of the most commercially visible video models outside the United States, and the Chinese generative video sector has been consolidating around a small number of funded players while Western equivalents have come and gone.
A Hong Kong listing would put the sector’s economics on the record for the first time: what it costs to serve video generation, what customers pay, and whether the unit economics work at the inference prices these models require. Those are the numbers no vendor in this category publishes voluntarily.
Nothing here is confirmed by Kuaishou, and a listing timed for “as soon as next year” is a plan rather than a date. The things to watch are a formal filing, which would make the financials public, and whether the $1 billion target survives contact with a Hong Kong market that raised a record amount in the third quarter and has watched several of its largest AI debuts trade below issue.
