SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund leads a wave of major investors bumping up ByteDance‘s valuation beyond the $400 billion mark, with the fund’s December assessment focusing on the potential of the company’s AI business Doubao. 

As Bloomberg reports, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have followed suit, valuing the company at over $410 billion and $450 billion respectively, according to the U.S. SEC filings from November.

ByteDance’s AI chatbot Doubao now serves 75 million regular active users, while the company reports its vision understanding model operates at 85% below industry average costs.

Last year, the Chinese company launched a web crawler called Bytespider that reportedly collects online data at a rate far exceeding that of other major tech companies. 

Research from bot management firm Kasada showed that Bytespider, which began operations in April, was scraping web data approximately 25 times faster than GPTbot, the crawler used by OpenAI for its ChatGPT platform. However, the bot does not respect robots.txt; a code website publishers use to signal that their data should not be collected.

SoftBank’s valuation methodology explicitly excludes TikTok’s U.S. operations due to regulatory uncertainties, suggesting potential additional upside if U.S. challenges are resolved.

Stock Performance and Buyback Activity 

The company’s stock has rebounded significantly from its July 2022 low of $275 billion, supported by strong revenue growth and renewed interest in Chinese tech stocks, particularly in the AI sector. 

ByteDance’s 2023 annual share buyback program priced shares at $180 each, representing a $300 billion valuation, up from $268 billion in the previous year. Current market activity shows some investors attempting to purchase shares at valuations as low as $240 billion, though sellers remain scarce at these levels.

The recent valuations mark a notable shift for ByteDance, which faces ongoing geopolitical challenges in its U.S. operations.