In an effort to become the first of China's up-and-coming AI companies to go public, Zhipu AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has started the beginning stages of an IPO.
Yicai discovered on the China Securities Regulatory Commission's web service platform today that Zhipu AI, which could be the first of China's "six artificial intelligence mini tigers" to go public, had sent its teaching documents to the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau. The teaching facility will be China International Capital.
Zhipu AI's tutoring records state that the firm has no controlling shareholders. The real controllers, however, are founder Tang Jie, chairman Liu Debing, and organizations working together, who control nearly 37 percent of the voting rights.
In 2019, Zhipu AI was established as a subsidiary from Tsinghua University and has since become one of China's leading companies in the artificial intelligence race. It competes with digital heavyweights like ByteDance and Alibaba as well as AI-focused startups Moonshot AI, Minimax, 01.AI, Baichuan, and StepFun.
After obtaining three rounds of state-backed funding in a matter of weeks, the startup gained attention earlier this year.
The Chengdu city government contributed 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) to its most recent funding.
The creator of the GLM family of language models, Zhipu AI, asserts that its flagship GLM4 model outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4 on a number of performance metrics.
This week, the business declared that the 32B and 9B variants of its GLM series would be made publicly available. According to a company statement, its GLM-Z1-32B-0414 model performs on par with the competitor's DeepSeek-R1 device at a thirtieth of the operational cost.
According to the regulatory filing, Tang Jie and Liu Debing are the owners of Zhipu AI, with Tang directly owning a 7.4 percent equity position in the business.
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A filing on the website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission states that China International Capital Corporation would serve as the IPO sponsor. CICC will provide initial due diligence on Zhipu's financials and operations in its capacity as sponsor.