Welcome to join ByteDance Investment Department.

"ByteDance's investment team is about to get active."

A friend working as an FA who just returned from Hong Kong shared this observation. This comes amid a recent development: according to Bloomberg, Kai Jiang has left the well-known investment institution Coatue and officially joined ByteDance to lead its Hong Kong-based investment team.

Moving forward, he will report to Julie Gao, CFO of ByteDance. Four years ago, Gao took over from Shou Zi Chew as ByteDance's CFO, and she has long been involved in investment and M&A transactions in the primary market.

People in the investment industry learned from insiders that the financial investment department Kai Jiang will head this time is not a newly established business, nor does it mean that the strategic investment department disbanded several years ago has been restored and restarted.

But this move is still highly indicative of future trends — the arrival of Kai Jiang will help ByteDance build a more systematic investment methodology for emerging technology startups. Going forward, more ByteDance investment professionals are expected to appear in the primary market.

ByteDance Has Recruited a Core Executive

Who is Kai Jiang?

In the memory of his peers, Kai Jiang previously worked at Coatue, in charge of investments in the Asian technology and consumer sectors. Public records show he graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree in economics, started his career at Morgan Stanley, then joined Providence Equity Partners to engage in TMT investment, joined Coatue in 2015, and has long been based in Hong Kong.

During his tenure at Coatue, Kai Jiang was deeply involved in the investment of many well-known projects, including Zuoyebang, Kuaikan Manhua, CertiK, and YunquNA, making him the core leader of Coatue's China market layout. Public information shows that Kai Jiang has served as the head of Coatue China since 2020.

Coatue holds a prominent position in the investment circle: founded in 1999, it is characterized by full-cycle technology investment, has offices in New York, Silicon Valley and Hong Kong, and manages assets of over 730 billion US dollars. It began to deploy the Chinese market around 2014 and is one of the most important US-dollar funds in China's internet era.

What the public may not know is that Coatue is also an important early investor in ByteDance, and has increased its stakes in ByteDance on multiple occasions since 2017. This means Kai Jiang has long had deep ties with ByteDance.

The arrival of Kai Jiang is expected to introduce a mature US-dollar technology investment system to ByteDance, complementing the previously missing institutionalized financial investment capabilities.

ByteDance CFO in the Spotlight

What is more noteworthy is that Kai Jiang will report directly to Julie Gao, CFO of ByteDance in the future.

Julie Gao is also a well-known veteran in the investment circle. Her resume is extremely impressive: she was born in Shanghai, obtained a Bachelor of Laws from Peking University, a Master of Sociology from the University of Alabama, and a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a legal career spanning more than 20 years.

Julie Gao

In April 2022, Liang Rubo, CEO of ByteDance, announced in an internal all-staff letter that Julie Gao joined ByteDance and officially took the position of CFO. Records show that Gao has provided legal services for the listing and other capital market financing projects of more than 100 companies, including Meituan, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Xiaomi; she has also provided legal services for many M&A and private equity projects, including Baidu and ByteDance.

At that time, Liang Rubo mentioned the origin of their cooperation in the all-staff letter: since 2016, Julie Gao has cooperated many times on ByteDance's acquisition and financing projects, and is familiar with the company's mission, culture, team and business. "Julie has a lot of experience and insights on corporate governance and enterprise development, and has provided consultation and help to many companies at different stages. We believe her joining will bring great value to the company."

It is reported that Julie Gao was deeply involved in ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly and Mutong Games, as well as several rounds of private equity financing, with total transaction amounts exceeding billions of US dollars. In particular, the acquisition of Musical.ly led by Julie Gao is the most important move in ByteDance's acquisition history, which laid the foundation for TikTok that later swept the global market.

This direct reporting line to the CFO further confirms that Kai Jiang's Hong Kong team is mainly focused on financial investment, rather than the traditional strategic investment arm of large tech companies.

This scene reminds people of four years ago — in early 2022, ByteDance's Strategy and Investment Department underwent drastic restructuring, with employees reassigned to various business lines, and all strategic investment activities were fully suspended. Originally, ByteDance formally established a financial investment team in 2021, led by Yang Jie who previously worked at HSG, which was at the same level as ByteDance's entire strategic investment team led by Zhao Pengyuan.

After that, Zhao Pengyuan transferred to the President's Office, and Yang Jie founded Jinqiu Fund in 2022, with some investment talents moving to the independent fund system.

But ByteDance's external investment has not completely stalled. Over the past few years, ByteDance has always maintained an independently operated financial investment business system, and has not interrupted its market-oriented investment layout. It has completely bid farewell to the previous strategic investment model that prioritized strategic synergy and large-scale industrial layout, and shifted to a more prudent, return-focused financial investment logic that focuses on core tracks.

Now, external investment is expected to become active again.

Alibaba and Tencent Have Reaped Huge Returns From Investments, ByteDance Is Catching Up

Obviously, this new move is targeting the AI track.

In line with the development direction of all tech giants, ByteDance's strategic focus has fully shifted to AI in the past two years, with bets laid out across computing power infrastructure, foundational models, cutting-edge hard technology and application layers.

At the in-house R&D level, ByteDance defines AI as the core strategy of "climbing the peak", with the Seed team responsible for the R&D of foundational large models, continuously iterating general multi-modal models, and successively launching Doubao, the overseas AI product Dola, as well as cutting-edge model matrices including Seedance video generation, Seed3D 3D generation, and VLA vision-action models, covering multiple core AI fields such as text, video, 3D, and robot vision.

A recent unconfirmed report shows that Zhang Yiming has deeply returned to the front line of core AI R&D, personally leading the team to tackle the cutting-edge world model track in the industry.

Apart from independent R&D, ByteDance's financial investment is also precisely anchored in the AI technology track.

Breaking away from the previous broad investment ideas in the internet and consumer sectors, ByteDance's recent moves are specifically targeting gaps in cutting-edge technologies, and it has successively invested in a number of emerging companies such as Shengshu Technology, Yingmu Technology, and Zibianliang Robotics, with its investment landscape focusing on hard-core fields including embodied intelligence, AI infrastructure, 3D generation, AI security, and robotics.

In the AI era, tech investment by large internet companies is extremely active.

On September 11, Enflame Technology officially landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, with its market value once exceeding 200 billion yuan at opening. Behind it, Tencent, with a stake of over 20%, has become the largest external investor, with a book profit of over 30 billion yuan.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking through the recent super IPOs, whether it is MiniMax, Zhipu AI, ChangXin Memory Technologies, or the soon-to-be-listed Yunbao Intelligent, Tencent is an important shareholder, quietly becoming an IPO catcher. In addition, Tencent is also an important investor in the currently red-hot companies such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, StepFun, Manus, and Kling AI.

Alibaba is also very aggressive. This year, it reaped the largest investment return in its history by heavily investing in ChangXin Memory Technologies. Its investments in recent years can be described as a "shopping spree" — the list includes Zhipu AI, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, Baichuan Intelligence, 01.AI, Silicon Flow, Montage Technology, Lightelligence, Unitree Robotics, Star Motion Era, and many others.

In contrast, ByteDance's investment moves can truly be described as "conservative".

Perhaps with the joining of the new senior executive, ByteDance will also bid farewell to scattered tentative investments, and move towards a professional, global, AI-centered systematic capital layout. While consolidating its AI technology landscape, it will also capture the capital dividends of the new global technology cycle.

This may be a watershed. In the AI era, all tech giants are reserving sufficient ammunition to invest in the core battlefield.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Investment" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Yang Jiyun, and authorized for release by 36Kr.