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Chinese artificial intelligence startups are trying to corner the U.S. market to drive rapid revenue growth to emulate TikTok’s success abroad amid a sluggish domestic industry.

MiniMax, ByteDance and 01.ai are among a group of Chinese AI companies that have launched AI products abroad, particularly in the United States, where there is a larger pool of high-spending users than in their home market.

Shanghai-based MiniMax, backed by HongShan, Alibaba and Tencent, has made great strides in the past year. The three-year-old unicorn has told investors it will generate around $70 million in revenue this year, a high forecast by the standards of AI startups that are struggling to monetize their technology.

Most of the revenue comes from MiniMax’s avatar chatbot app Talkie, which has proven popular with U.S. teenagers, three people familiar with the matter say.

TikTok owner ByteDance also launched a number of AI apps overseas last year and integrated AI features into its existing apps, such as photo editing app Hypic. Beijing-based startup 01.ai is behind productivity tool PopAi and is currently beta testing an AI search app, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This underscores the potential for Chinese companies to launch competitive AI apps in the US, despite chip restrictions in Washington and intense scrutiny of the sector. Experts believe China has a competitive advantage in launching products like avatar chatbots, which don’t require as much computing resources because they are trained on smaller amounts of data than productivity chatbots.

But it also highlights the challenges Chinese AI startups face in their home market in generating revenue to cover the high computational costs associated with model training, at a time when the pace of fundraising has slowed after a flurry of activity last year.

The slower pace of funding is putting pressure on AI groups to show they can grow revenue quickly, pushing them into foreign markets where they have a better chance of making money than in China, where consumers are more likely to shy away from subscriptions.

Chinese AI companies are at a “critical inflection point,” according to Adina Yakefu, China AI expert at machine learning platform Hugging Face. “Given the difficulty of making money in China and fierce competition in the domestic market, expanding abroad is a necessary decision,” she added.

MiniMax, for example, has struggled to monetize its domestic version of the talkie app, Xingye, as successfully as its foreign counterpart, according to two people familiar with the matter. MiniMax declined to comment.

The group generates most of its revenue from advertising on Talkie, but also has a premium subscription that allows users to continue longer conversations with avatars.

One person warned that the group’s sales forecast could change due to fluctuating demand. MiniMax was most recently valued at $2.5 billion in a funding round announced in March, raising $600 million.

Chinese AI groups are trying to avoid the problems ByteDance faces with Washington over a possible ban on TikTok by setting up their units overseas, either in Singapore, Hong Kong or the US.

They then operate the foreign apps on servers outside of China, according to several people familiar with the matter. MiniMax uses overseas AWS data centers to perform inference for its Talkie app.

According to data provider SensorTower, Talkie was the 12th most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August this year, just behind US-based competitor Character.ai.

Other Chinese apps have also found their way around the world. ByteDance’s Hypic and Question AI, the homework assistant from edtech company Zuoyebang, are in the list of the 20 most downloaded apps.

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco