Kling AI has closed one of the largest funding rounds the AI industry has ever seen. The video-generation model, spun out of Chinese short-video giant Kuaishou, raised close to $3 billion — the biggest single financing ever recorded for an AI video company — at a valuation of roughly $18 billion.
The round was co-led by BlueFive Capital, the fast-growing Abu Dhabi-based investment platform, alongside CPE, Guofang Investment, Tencent and CITIC Securities. More than ten other institutions piled in, including Chinese internet heavyweights Baidu and Alibaba Cloud.
Why a video model is worth $18 billion
Text and image generators grabbed the early AI spotlight, but video is the expensive frontier — every clip demands enormous compute, and the field has become a genuine arms race between OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, Runway and a wave of Chinese challengers. A raise of this size is a bet that Kling can keep buying its way to the front of that pack.
Unlike many frontier-model labs still hunting for revenue, Kling can point to an actual business. Kuaishou has said the unit’s revenue topped 650 million yuan (about $96 million) in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 300% year over year, with an annualized run rate approaching $500 million. Kuaishou will keep a 68.33% controlling stake after the deal, and Kling is reportedly lining up an independent listing in Hong Kong within the next year.
For BlueFive Capital, the check is as much a statement as an investment. The firm only opened a Beijing office last year and has been steadily assembling a China portfolio spanning robotics, AI and autonomous driving.
“Securing a strategic allocation in a funding round of this magnitude validates our ability to access premier, highly sought-after opportunities alongside established investors… Kling AI has not only established itself as a technological powerhouse with a world-leading AI video model but has also demonstrated the ability to commercialize its platform.”
Hazem Ben-Gacem, Founder and CEO, BlueFive Capital
The deal is also a data point in a bigger trend: Gulf capital moving aggressively into Chinese technology even as Washington tightens the screws on China’s AI ambitions. BlueFive, which says it now manages $15 billion in assets across offices from London to Muscat to Beijing, is wagering that cross-border access matters more than the geopolitical crosswinds.
The obvious question is valuation. At $18 billion, Kling is priced at more than 30 times its annualized revenue in a category that is crowded, cash-hungry and moving fast enough that today’s state-of-the-art model can look ordinary a quarter later. Kuaishou’s new backers will be hoping that Hong Kong listing arrives before the hype cools.
