Chinese streaming service and esports mainstay Bilibili received a $400 million dollar investment of equity from Sony Corporation of America on Thursday, with the PlayStation parent company now owning 4.98% of the company. Reports value Bilibili at around $8 billion dollars, with SonyCorp picking up around 17 million shares and furthering its own expansion into China. Bilibili is a name and service most likely foreign to American audiences but whose story is a mirror of its own major game streaming service, Twitch.
The site originally began as a Hatsune Miku fan site and forum in 2009 and named for a reference to the popular anime A Certain Scientific Railgun. This connection to anime would be the major break needed for Bilibili to gain popularity, as the site started hosting Chinese-subbed versions of shows such as Fate/Zero in 2012. Through the explosion of sports in the Chinese market, Bilibili would eventually go public on the US Stock Exchange in 2018 with a $4 billion dollar IPO. Since then Bilibili has strengthened its ties with anime, even working with Funimation in 2019, owned by Sony.
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