Musical.ly has been acquired by Chinese tech company Bytedance in a deal reported to be worth up to $1 billion (£763 million).

Following its launch in China three years ago, the lip-sync app now has more than 200 million users globally. The Shanghai-based company has reported more than 60m monthly active users.

Musical.ly was developed by Louis Yang and Alex Zhu, who will both join Bytedance, which has been expanding rapidly.  

"Musical.ly's vision is to make entertainment more personal, participatory and interactive, by enabling anyone to be a content creator," said Zhu. "To achieve this, we need to constantly innovate to provide new and exciting video creation tools to our users, and we see AI as a critical factor in augmenting human creativity. Bytedance's leading AI technologies and top-notch AI developers can empower us to innovate faster and roll out new user offerings unlike anything users have experienced before. At Musical.ly we have recently also been focused on expanding into Asian markets, and this partnership will allow us to access Bytedance's massive user base in China, Japan and Korea, and around Asia."

Musical.ly has an existing licensing partnerships with Apple Music.

Musical.ly is the first Chinese social media app to make a major impact in the US and Europe.

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