US investors seek to buy out TikTok

(Image credit: TikTok)

Bytedance’s TikTok finally has some good news as a group of investors based out of the US is planning to buy the entity from the Chinese owner as a whole. The short video app has been the talk of the town ever since it got banned in India and has lately been under scrutiny by the US government and looking for ways to steer away from a ban.

The Information has reported that an investor group led by General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, are discussing with other regulators for loosening the Chinese link off the company which is also the wish of the company lately. This could make it operate as a company in America in the future and ease the concerns of governments like the US and India.

After the acquisition, Bytedance which currently owns TikTok will just be a non-voting member with the least amount of stakes in the international business. If we recall, Bytedance acquired Musical.ly in 2017 and this marked the birth of an app that no one ever believed would make it this huge.

Although the Chinese owner is trying its best to defend itself saying the app is safe, the allegations of spying, a mystery on storing users data outside of a client country, and China’s stringent in-house laws aren't doing anything good for them. Thus, it has been getting requests for a potential deal from investors based out of New York, Silicon Valley but none have gone past the proposal like the General Atlantic group.

Anyway, this news comes at the brink of an imminent election in the United States and the contemporary President Trump’s campaigning team has been slapping a ‘spy from China’ tag on TikTok all over its social media. Further, the White House is already reviewing an action against TikTok and put it on the banned entity list.

The initial talks collapsed after the Indian Government slashed an immediate ban which otherwise would have could have resulted in something useful for the company. Additionally, the US Committee on Foreign Investments (Cfius) has been a headache for TikTok and it neither wants to share its technology to rivals nor step out of business.

Abdul Q

Abdul Q is a Content editor at Techradar India. Formerly.