Kuaishou’s Kling AI video tool drives 84% surge in shares

Kuaishou Technology’s shares have risen 84% over the past year, driven by global interest in its AI video generator, Kling.

Kuaishou, based in Beijing, was previously best known as a short video-streaming platform and competitor to ByteDance.

The company launched Kling in July 2024, aiming to compete with OpenAI’s Sora, and has since reached 60 million users.

According to Sensor Tower, Kling ranked as the top-grossing graphics and design app for iPhones in South Korea and Russia as of January 2, and was in the top 10 in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, and Turkey.

Kuaishou projects Kling will generate US$140 million in annual revenue for 2025, and in the first quarter of 2025, about 70% of Kling’s revenue came from user subscriptions.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Kling growth lacks clarity on profit basics

Kuaishou guides to US$140 million in 2025 Kling revenue, yet it says AI spending will trim 1% to 2% from the group profit margin 1.
In Q1 2025, Kling brought in RMB 150 million (~US$21 million) with 70% from subscriptions 1, and midyear investments doubled the AI CapEx budget 2.
Executives say Kling earns ‘positive marginal profit at inference level’ (cost to run the model to generate outputs) 2. That omits training and ongoing GPU expansion (chips used to run AI models), so profits may lean on Kuaishou ads or e-commerce.
A reported 60 million users and 600 million videos signal strong uptake, yet no disclosed average revenue per user (ARPU) or gross margins lets investors judge scalability without subsidies.

Enterprise compliance gap opens room for provenance tools

More than 10,000 corporate clients use Kling’s APIs 1. 30,000+ enterprises and developers connect, yet disclosures do not say if Kling supports Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) Content Credentials or digital watermarking.
C2PA adds cryptographically signed metadata to verify content origin plus edits 3, while digital watermarks link content to provenance (who created and modified it) when metadata is stripped 4.
Vendors and compliance platforms can ship wrapper solutions (middleware that adds capabilities without modifying Kling) to add C2PA manifests, watermark embedding, plus content verification before production.
Provenance tool developers can target Kling’s 10,000+ corporate API clients with services that meet authenticity standards with auditable content chains (end-to-end logs of creation plus edits) 1.