35-year-old unknown creates the world's most valuable startup

Zhang Yiming, founder of Beijing ByteDance Technology Co, poses for a photograph at the company's headquarters in Beijing, China, on Thursday, Aug 17, 2017. The company is best known for a mobile app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets. - Bloomberg

HONG KONG: When Zhang Yiming first shopped the idea of a news aggregation app powered by artificial intelligence six years ago, investors including Sequoia Capital were skeptical.

Back then, the question was how a 29-year-old locally trained software engineer could outsmart the numerous news portals operated by the likes of social media behemoth Tencent Holdings Ltd and extract profit where even Google had failed.