Kuaishou is a Chinese video sharing app, developed by Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co., Ltd. Outside of China, it has also gained considerable popularity in other markets: it has topped the Google Play and Apple App Store "most downloaded" lists in eight countries. This app known as Snack video in India. It is often referred to as "Kwai" in overseas markets. Kuaishou's predecessor, "GIF Kuaishou", was founded in March 2011. GIF Kuaishou was a mobile application created to make and share GIF pictures. In November 2012, Kuaishou transformed into a short video community, and a platform for users to record and share videos depicting their everyday lives. By 2013, the app had already reached 100 million daily users. By 2019, that figure had surpassed 200 million active daily users. Kuaishou has a particularly strong user base among users outside of China's tier 1 cities. In March 2017, Kuaishou closed a US$350 million investment round led by Tencent. In January 2018, Forbes estimated the company's valuation to be US$18 billion. Kuaishou was founded by Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao. Prior to co-founding Kuaishou, Su Hua had worked for both Google and Baidu as an engineer. The company is headquartered in Haidian District, Beijing, China. Kuaishou's main competitor is Douyin, which is known as TikTok outside of China. In 2019, the company announced a partnership with the People's Daily, an official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, to help it experiment with artificial intelligence in news. In early May of 2020, Kuaishou launched a short-video app called Zynn, which paid users to use the app and refer other people. It was criticized for being a pyramid scheme, plagiarizing user interfaces from TikTok, and stealing user content from said platform. The app was removed from the Google Play Store on June 10. In June 2020, the Government of India banned Kwai along with 58 other apps citing data and privacy issues. Recent border tensions between India and China might have also played a role in the ban.
