History
Kuaishou is China's first short video platform[9] that was developed in 2011 by engineer Hua Su and Cheng Yixiao. Prior to co-founding Kuaishou, Su Hua had worked for both Google and Baidu as a software engineer. The company is headquartered in Haidian District, Beijing.[10]
Kuaishou's predecessor "GIF Kuaishou" was founded in March 2011. GIF Kuaishou was a mobile app with which users could make and share GIF pictures. In 2013, Kuaishou became a short-video social platform.[11] By 2013, the app had reached 100 million daily users.[12] By 2019, it had exceeded 200million active daily users.[13]
In March 2017, Kuaishou closed a US$350 million investment round that was led by Tencent.[12] In January 2018, Forbes estimated the company's valuation to be US$18 billion.[14]
In April 2018, Kuaishou's app was briefly banned from Chinese app stores after China Central Television (CCTV) reported on the platform popularizing videos of teenage mothers.[15]
In 2019, the company announced a partnership with the People's Daily, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, to help it experiment with the use of artificial intelligence in news.[16]
In June 2020, following the start of the 2020–2021 China–India skirmishes, the Government of India banned Kwai along with 58 other apps, citing "data and privacy issues".[17]
In January 2021, Kuaishou announced it was planning an initial public offering (IPO) to raise approximately US$5 billion.[18] Kuaishou's stock completed its first day of trading at $300 Hong Kong dollars (HKD) (US$38.70), more than doubling its initial offer price, and causing its market value to rise to over $1 trillion HKD (US$159 billion).[19][20]
In February 2021, Kuaishou made a debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with its shares soaring by 194% at the opening.[21] The company subsequently encountered major setbacks as a result of heightened regulatory restrictions on Chinese internet firms, which contributed to its share price falling by nearly 80% from its post-IPO peak.[22] By December 2021, Kuaishou announced a major reorganization, including the layoff of 30% of its staff, primarily targeting mid-level employees earning an annual salary of $157,000 or more. This restructuring aimed to cut costs and mitigate financial losses.[22]
In October 2022, state-owned Beijing Radio and Television Station took a minority ownership stake in Kuaishou.[23]
In April 2024, a Financial Times article citing current and former Kuaishou employees stated that the company has been running an ageist redundancy programme known internally as "Limestone", culling workers in their mid-30s.[24] In June 2024, Kuaishou and the Sichuan international communication center launched a branch center in São Paulo, Brazil.[25]
In June 2024, Kuaishou released its diffusion transformer text-to-video model, Kling, which they claimed could generate two minutes of video at 30 frames per second and in 1080p resolution. The model has been compared to that of OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model. It is accessible to the public on Kuaishou's video editing app KwaiCut via signing up for a waitlist with a Chinese phone number.[26][27][28]
In December 2025, Kuaishou came under a cyberattack which led to a temporary influx of violent and pornographic content.[29]
