Xiaohongshu plans to secretly submit its Hong Kong IPO application by the end of this month, with a valuation that once reached $31 billion.

According to monitoring by Insight Beating, Xiaohongshu (often referred to as RED) plans to quietly submit its application for a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) by the end of this month. Bloomberg, quoting people with direct knowledge of the plans, reported that Xiaohongshu is working with advisory firms to advance the necessary preparations for the offering. Founded in Shanghai in 2013 by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao, Xiaohongshu counts investors including Tencent, Alibaba, Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital, and GGV Capital. A 2024 funding round valued the company at roughly $17 billion; that valuation jumped to $31 billion in a September 2025 secondary market transaction, and the firm projected a full-year profit of around $3 billion in 2025 for its shareholders. Although the Hong Kong market has seen strong demand for tech company IPOs this year — with a flurry of listings from emerging AI service and hardware developers like MiniMax and Wall Ring Technology — the rise of new AI services poses a potential threat to Xiaohongshu, with the risk of eroding traffic and undermining the business models of traditional social platforms. Xiaohongshu also faces intense competition from ByteDance’s Douyin in the short video and social e-commerce space. Notably, during the brief 2024 TikTok ban in the U.S., Xiaohongshu’s international version, RedNote, quickly gained traction among global users as an alternative platform.