Kling AI picks banks for a $1B Hong Kong listing
The AI money story keeps circling back to Hong Kong — and today it's the video generation business making its move, while defense-tech AI quietly keeps raising.
Kling AI has hired CICC, Goldman Sachs and UBS to guide a Hong Kong IPO that could raise at least $1 billion, according to Bloomberg's October 6 report, with a listing targeted as soon as 2027. The Kuaishou-owned video model unit is staging the offering off real revenue: its first half reportedly brought in more than 1.5 billion yuan (about $210 million), with the second quarter alone topping 850 million yuan, up roughly 200% year over year. That growth follows a July round of about $2.8 billion from Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu that valued the company near $18 billion post-money — and a National AI Industry Fund stake implying a valuation around $17 billion, roughly the size of Kuaishou itself. Kuaishou shares rose 3% on the news, but nothing is filed yet: the banks were selected, no prospectus exists, and both the company and the banks have declined to comment, so size and timing can still move. The reason this matters beyond one company is that it tests whether Hong Kong will price AI-video the way it has started pricing AI labs — we covered Moonshot AI files for Hong Kong IPO at $50B last month. The catch: ByteDance's Seedance is reported to hold over 80% of the video-gen market, so Kling is going public as the profitable challenger to an overwhelming leader.
Gallatin AI raised a $50 million Series A to expand Navigator, the AI supply-chain platform it sells to the U.S. military. The round was led by new and existing investors including 8VC and Silent Ventures and brings the El Segundo startup's total to $70 million after its seed; Navigator already runs with Army and Air Force customers, supporting exercises from Japan to Alaska to Europe, and the company will spend the money on engineering and deeper AI sustainment capabilities. The appeal for investors is unglamorous and durable: Pentagon leadership has repeatedly called contested logistics a priority, and Gallatin's pitch is that most of that work still runs on manual inventory reports and chat messages — though the startup publishes no customer counts or measured outcomes, so the claimed time savings remain the company's own word.
What to watch: whether Kling files an actual prospectus — a bank selection is a strong signal, but Hong Kong listings have slipped before.
Is Hong Kong becoming the default exchange for AI companies that can't list in the U.S.? Tell us in the comments.
