Wall Street Is Lending Billions to China’s Hottest Tech Unicorns

Wall Street banks are taking their unicorn playbooks to China.

After arranging billions of dollars in loans for highly valued -- and money-losing -- U.S. startups like Uber Technologies Inc., banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are angling to do the same for some of China’s biggest unicorns. They helped Bytedance Ltd., owner of the wildly popular TikTok video app, borrow $1.3 billion in April and are said to be raising as much as $1.4 billion for two other Chinese tech startups -- borrowers that until recently had rarely tapped the syndicated loan market.

Banks are betting ...