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Nicole Jao · · 7 min readByteDance’s 10,000-employee bet on the edtech bubble
Chinese tech unicorn ByteDance is quickly becoming one of the most powerful players in the entertainment and digital content business, with the TikTok owner expanding its sprawling empire rapidly.
The company dipped its toes in education three years ago. This year, it is going full-force with the new brand Dali Education, where all of its edtech products now fall under.
Image credit: Siddharth Bishnu
While some remain skeptical of ByteDance’s seemingly trial-and-error approach to China’s notoriously cash-burning education sector, the company has advantages that very few have. Money, for example, affords the company the luxury to test different products. It also has the ability to take new products to scale by leveraging its successful apps.
Tech in Asia reached out to ByteDance, but the company declined to comment on this story.
Upping the ante
China’s online education market is estimated to reach US$63.6 billion this year. It’s not just ByteDance that wants a piece of the market: Chinese technology giants Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu do too. However, most companies struggle to be profitable as fierce competition is forcing them to spend heavily on user acquisition.
ByteDance is undeterred, however.
The company has been eager to expand outside of its core entertainment business into areas including gaming and ecommerce, but education is “at the top of its priority list,” according to founder and CEO Zhang Yiming.
In just three years, the company expanded its education workforce to 10,000 employees. It also named top executives to lead its education initiatives. Chen Lin, previously the CEO of news aggregation app Jinri Toutiao, is heading Dali Education, and Yang Luyu, co-founder of TikTok predecessor Musical.ly, is leading an AI tutor hardware project.
Aside from putting its top management in charge, the company set up a new, wholly owned subsidiary Boxue in March and acquired Chinese early childhood education startup NPY. ByteDance now has around 20 education products, including an AI-assisted language tutoring platform and a smart lamp that comes with an AI camera that was launched this year.
Casting a wide net
ByteDance goes about the education business in typical ByteDance fashion: with fast iteration. Dubbed as “China’s mobile app factory,” it knows how to move fast into different verticals and has the resources to do so. The company product portfolio cuts across seven categories.
In 2018, it entered the language learning space with one-on-one live tutoring platform GoGoKid. Shortly after, it bought online mathematics school Hua Luogeng and renamed it Qingbei Online School when it moved into the K-12 segment.
No profits, no problem?
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The world’s most valuable unicorn ramped up its efforts in education this year. With a lot of money to burn, does it have a shot?
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