Zhipu AI, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn born out of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, has filed pre-initial public offering (IPO) documents with China’s securities regulator as it eyes a public listing as soon as 2026 amid an increasingly competitive domestic landscape.
The 6-year-old company submitted the tutoring documents to the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau on Monday, a key compliance step before formally applying to the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The start-up plans to finalise its IPO application preparation by October, with China International Capital Corporation (CICC) serving as the tutoring institution. This would set it up for a possible IPO next year, but the company did not specify which exchange it is targeting.
Zhipu – whose controlling shareholders are founder Tang Jie, a renowned Tsinghua computer scientist, and chairman Liu Debing – has attracted more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) in funding. Investors include state-backed entities such as Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science City, Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund and local government funds from the cities of Chengdu, Hangzhou and Zhuhai. Venture capital firms HongShan Capital Group, GL Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, Lightspeed China Partners and Capital Today are also backers, as are a number of Chinese tech giants, including Xiaomi, Meituan, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, according to corporate database Tianyancha and company announcements.
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Zhipu has quickly risen to become a darling of China’s AI industry and is considered one of its “four tigers”, alongside start-ups Baichuan, Moonshot AI and MiniMax. It has recently made some strategic investments as it looks to expand.
Last year, Zhipu launched a 1.5 billion yuan venture fund called “Z”, targeting early-stage AI start-ups. The fund has backed dozens of companies, including AI infrastructure firm Infinigence AI, Siliconflow, Modelbest and multimodal AI developer Vidu.
Zhipu is the first of the “little tigers” to pursue an IPO. Some of its peers have been facing an existential crisis after Hangzhou-based start-up DeepSeek upended the economics of the industry with its low-cost, high-performance models.
This has led to a wave of Chinese tech firms announcing plans to open-source their own models, meaning the models would be freely available for anyone to use and modify. On Monday, Zhipu said it was open-sourcing a series of models that include its foundational, reasoning and deep-research models under the MIT Licence. The models are available through its new Z.ai platform and its business-focused Model-as-a-Service platform.
The company claims that its latest GLM-Z1-32B-0414 reasoning model can compete with top-tier models like DeepSeek-R1, with inference speeds of up to 200 tokens per second. Zhipu also said it is charging just 3 per cent of what DeepSeek’s reasoning model costs.
Zhipu’s ambitions come amid an escalating US-China tech war that has recently ensnared the start-up. In January, the US Department of Commerce placed Zhipu and its subsidiaries on its Entity List, alleging that its technology supports China’s military advancements. The designation restricts access to advanced chips, among other technologies, from US suppliers without explicit government approval.
Zhipu has denied the allegations, saying the move “lacks a factual basis”, but adding that it “will not have a substantial impact” on its business.
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