The US Department of Justice issued a memo on July 18 reversing a 2022 ban that barred federal employees from installing TikTok on government devices, citing ByteDance's transfer of TikTok's US user data and operations to a majority American-owned joint venture as resolving the security concerns behind the original prohibition.

X Square Robot closes four straight rounds past RMB 20bn (~US$2.8bn) backed by Meituan, Alibaba, ByteDance and Xiaomi; AI² Robotics raises ~RMB 5bn (~US$736m)

China's AI-and-software capital, where 115 unicorns worth US$594.9bn cluster in the Haidian-Zhongguancun corridor, led by Baidu, ByteDance, and a ring of university AI labs.

The global startup category covering social media, messaging, and entertainment apps for individual users; the United States leads in revenue, with US$167 billion in global app-store spending in 2025.