Byteplus, a subsidiary of ByteDance, the enterprise division of ByteDance, is expanding its operations in South Korea. After penetrating deep into the Korean market with TikTok and CapCut, the Chinese tech giant is now expanding its reach into the business-to-business (B2B) segment by leveraging high-performance video generation artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Byte Plus is currently recruiting for an AI sales manager and solution architect in South Korea, according to Information Technology (IT) Industry on Tuesday. BytePlus is a B2B subsidiary of ByteDance that provides various AI solutions and cloud services to companies around the world. The company will start operations in South Korea in 2022, and has recently been actively hiring more people. Last month, BytePlus held its first partner and customer event in South Korea, introducing its AI model lineup to around 200 industry participants.
According to industry insiders, ByteDance is stepping up its attacks on South Korea’s B2B market following the announcement of its AI video generation model “Seedance 2.0.” Seedance 2.0, a multimodal AI model that generates video from text, image, audio, and video inputs, was deployed in various countries from March to April. After first being announced in February, the model quickly took the top spot in Artificial Analysis’ video generation benchmarks and was compared to the “second DeepSeek shock.”
BytePlus recently added Seedance 2.0 to its product lineup and is actively marketing this solution to enterprise customers. The CEO of a startup company who attended a Baitoplus partner event said, “Seedance 2.0 seems to be fully usable at the business level for applications such as advertising and drama production,” adding, “Byteplus is emphasizing this point and actively marketing it to client companies.”
Meanwhile, ByteDance already has significant influence in South Korea’s business-to-consumer (B2C) platform market. According to Mobile Index, CapCut, ByteDance’s video editing application, had 1,105,444 monthly active users (MAU) as of March, making it the largest video editing application used in South Korea. TikTok announced last month that it will invest more than 75 billion won ($55 million) in South Korea’s TikTok ecosystem this year. Regarding ByteDance’s interest in South Korea, an industry source explained, “This is an extension of ByteDance’s broader push to grow its business not only in South Korea but also overseas.” The official added, “South Korea may be a small market, but it is proactive in introducing AI and has strong content production capabilities, so it is a high growth opportunity for major overseas high-tech companies.”
