Facing the Seedance 2.0 challenge? Kuaishou Keling aims to double its revenue within the year

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Author | Huang Yu

On March 25, after only two years on the market, Sora, which once sparked a global AI video generation frenzy, announced its exit from the historical stage.

OpenAI’s abandonment of Sora reflects the immense challenges facing the video generation field; even the world’s leading AI players find such a cash-burning project unsustainable.

When video generation can no longer just be technical showmanship but must truly evolve into a tool usable in workflows, those listed companies using video generation as their narrative must also produce more “granular” commercialization roadmaps.

On March 25, Kuaishou Technology (01024.HK) released its 2025 Q4 and full-year results: total Q4 revenue increased by 11.8% year-on-year to 39.6 billion yuan, adjusted net profit rose 16% to 5.5 billion yuan; full-year total revenue increased by 12.5% year-on-year to 142.8 billion yuan, adjusted net profit reached 20.6 billion yuan, up 16.5% year-over-year, and adjusted net profit margin lifted to 14.5%.

This year, while Kuaishou continued to ramp up its AI investments, it steadily improved its profit margins.

On the much-watched AI commercialization front, Kuaishou’s AI video generation platform Koling AI achieved Q4 revenue of 340 million yuan, slightly below institutional expectations at the start of the year.

Notably, it was previously reported that Koling AI’s monthly revenue already exceeded 20 million USD in December last year, so earlier this year, institutions raised Koling AI’s Q4 revenue expectations from 300 million to a 350–400 million yuan range.

Looking at full-year 2025, Koling AI’s total revenue reached 1.04 billion yuan, approximately 150 million USD.

Kuaishou Technology co-founder and CEO Cheng Yixiao revealed that by January this year, Koling AI’s annualized revenue run rate (ARR) had already exceeded 300 million USD.

Cheng Yixiao said that based on current growth momentum and commercialization progress, the company remains strongly confident that Koling AI will more than double its revenue in 2026. “With continual model improvements, more refined product forms, and stronger adaptation to professional scenarios, Koling AI commercialization is likely to accelerate further.”

This means Kuaishou’s AI strategy has officially moved beyond the “storytelling” stage, entering a more visible phase of commercial realization.

If in advertising and e-commerce, Kuaishou is wrestling head-to-head with competitors like Douyin in a stock market, then in AI, Kuaishou is trying to leverage its first-mover advantage in technology monetization to build its own moat.

It is understood that since Q4 2025, Koling AI has successively launched the unified multimodal video model Koling O1, the Koling 2.6 model with “simultaneous sound and picture” capability, as well as the Koling 3.0 series models built around the All-in-One concept.

Kuaishou management stated that improvements in model quality and innovative product functions are driving continuous breakthroughs in commercialization capability.

Currently, major vendors are accelerating the iteration of video generation models; ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, launched before the 2026 Spring Festival, once attracted global attention.

Regarding the increasing competitive intensity in the industry and its impact on Kuaishou, Cheng Yixiao stated that at present, video generation remains far from mature both technologically and in product terms. The faster iteration of Seedance 2.0 and other major model upgrades has positively impacted the industry, lowering creative barriers for ordinary users and increasing AI video generation’s penetration in more application scenarios, expanding the overall industry “cake.”

“The technology route for multimodal input that Seedance 2.0 takes is consistent with Koling O1, further validating Kuaishou’s forward-looking approach in iterating models based on multimodality.”

Cheng Yixiao believes Koling’s model and product capabilities remain world-leading. In video generation large model rankings, Koling’s benchmark test scores all lead; for character consistency, controllability, physical realism, and complex scenario stability, Koling 3.0 excels, further strengthening Koling AI’s differentiated advantages among professional creators and enterprise customers.

A recent Goldman Sachs report pointed out that Koling 3.0 maintains competitiveness in film-level detail and pricing advantages, and continues to be ranked among the world’s top models in third-party benchmark testing.

Although market competition is currently intense, Goldman Sachs also believes the AI video generation field is not a “winner-takes-all” zero-sum game. Leading models like Kuaishou Koling and ByteDance’s Dream 2.0 will all benefit from the rapidly expanding market, and advances in AI will reshape the entire value distribution of the entertainment industry.

Goldman Sachs expects the global AI video generation market size to grow tenfold in the next five years, reaching about $29 billion by 2030—enough to accommodate the coexistence of multiple leading players.

Of course, to maintain competitiveness in video generation, Kuaishou must continue to increase investment.

Kuaishou CFO Jin Bing stated that the group’s total capex for 2026 is expected to reach about 26 billion yuan. The additional 11 billion yuan over 2025 will mainly be used to support Koling large models and other foundational large models’ computing power, as well as routine server procurement expenses such as offline data storage and processing, and investment in data/computing centers.

AI is becoming Kuaishou’s core growth engine. In addition to direct subscription revenue from Koling AI, AI has also significantly improved efficiency in various Kuaishou business scenarios.

Kuaishou management pointed out that the company is continuing to deepen the empowerment of its content and commercial ecosystem by AI large model technology, as well as enhancing organizational capacity through foundational upgrades.

Today, online marketing services remain the source of more than half of Kuaishou’s revenue. In the fourth quarter of last year, Kuaishou’s revenue from online marketing services reached 23.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.5%.

Kuaishou noted that, in Q4, generative recommendation large models and intelligent bidding models brought about a 5% incremental boost to domestic online marketing service revenue. At the same time, marketing spending from AIGC-generated materials totaled 4 billion yuan, up from over 3 billion yuan in the previous quarter.

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