ByteDance headquarters in Beijing. Credit: Imaginechina via AP Images
ByteDance became one of the world’s most valuable, privately-owned companies — arguably the most valuable — in just eight years. How did it get there?
For this week’s Big Picture, we took a look at the investors that built ByteDance into the company that it is today. Its earliest funding, for instance, came from the Chinese affiliate of an American firm, the Susquehanna International Group, alongside Chinese investors and Yuri Milner, the Israeli-Russian investor who once backed Facebook. But as the company has grown, U.S. and Japanese investors have taken a bigger slice of the pie, with a few firms from Europe and South America sprinkled in.
Because China has tight regulations on who can invest in internet or technology firms, Zhang Yiming, the company's founder, controls most of the shares of the Chinese registered company, according to corporate records reviewed by The Wire’s data
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