(Yicai Global) Aug. 14 -- Toutiao, China's most popular personalized news aggregator, has completed a new round of financing worth close to CNY13.3 billion (USD2 billion) through US private equity firm General Atlantic and other investors.

The funding amount almost doubles the company's market value to USD22 billion, beating out Chinese social media giant Weibo Corp. [NASDAQ:WB].

Toutiao is making money and therefore doesn't need a lot of financing, one industry insider told Yicai Global when asked about the investment amount.

Toutiao obtained USD1 billion in D-round financing at the end of last year and the firm will use this year's round to fund international expansion, which has been one of the firm's core strategies since former Uber China strategy director Liu Zhen joined the company last year.

"China's internet population currently makes up just one-fifth of the global internet population," said Zhang Yiming, Toutiao founder. "Without global organization of resources and growing the scale of the product, the-one fifth cannot compete with the other four-fifths. So we need to increase our views overseas."

Toutiao currently promotes the news aggregation platform TopBuzz in North America, recently acquired Indian mobile video creator platform Flipagram and has invested in Dailyhunt, the country's largest mobile news reader. It also owns a majority stake in Indonesian aggregator BABE, and runs businesses in Brazil and Japan.

General Atlantic will not only provide capital, but also resources for the overseas market and projects. The equity firm has previously invested in other internet companies such as Uber Technologies Inc., Airbnb Inc., Snap Inc.[NYSE:SNAP] and Priceline.Com.

The growth equity firm, established in 1980, mainly focuses on medium- and late-stage investment in the internet technology, medical, financial services, commercial services and consumer retail sectors. Since entering China in 2000, the organization had invested in 17 projects as of the end of last year, worth a total of USD1.5 billion.

In the media field, General Atlantic has also invested in the US news aggregation website BuzzFeed, and made similar investments in Germany, Singapore and Canada.

Toutiao provides personalized information services to users through the application of big data, and is one of the fastest growing services in China's mobile internet field.