The Tsinghua-spun GLM lab — China's first listed 'AI Tiger' and most valuable public AI pure play
HQ: Beijing, China | Founded: 2019 | Employees: 1,000+ (2026) | Stage: Public (HKEX, January 2026) | Website: https://www.z.ai
Zhipu AI traces its roots to 2019 and the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) at Tsinghua University, led by Professor Tang Jie — making it the most academically pedigreed of China's 'AI Tigers.' The company, with Zhang Peng as CEO, built GLM (General Language Model), China's first open-source LLM lineage: GLM-130B (2022) was among the first serious open Chinese LLMs, and the GLM-4 / GLM-5 / GLM-5.2 series kept Zhipu at the frontier alongside DeepSeek and Moonshot.\n\nThe company rebranded as Z.ai in 2025, emphasizing international ambition: open-weights GLM models are widely adopted globally (GLM-4.5 and GLM-5 ranked among the best open models of their generations), and the Z.ai app and API serve consumers, developers, and enterprises — with especially strong traction in Chinese enterprise and government segments, where Tsinghua credentials carry weight.\n\nFinancially, Zhipu raised roughly $1.5B before its IPO (a 2023 round valued it at ~$2.8B, and it reached ~$3B by March 2024). On January 8, 2026 it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange: shares priced at HK$116.20, raising ~HK$4.35B (~$558M) at an implied ~$6.6B valuation, and quickly rallied. By June 2026 its market cap topped HK$1 trillion (US$128B) as GLM-5.2 hype and China's AI-stock boom drove a spectacular run; it later settled around US$62B (August 2026), still making Z.ai the most valuable public AI pure play in China. Revenue is scaling fast: H1 2026 revenue was ~RMB 954M (~$142M), up roughly 400% year-over-year, with open-platform and API revenue up 28x to ~$122M.
Zhipu AI is the academic heart of China's AI-tiger wave: spun out of Tsinghua's Knowledge Engineering Group, it built GLM — China's first open-source LLM lineage — and turned a research lab into one of the country's biggest AI businesses. The 2025-26 period was extraordinary: after raising ~$1.5B privately, it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026 at ~$6.6B, and its shares rode China's AI-stock frenzy to a market cap above US$128B by June 2026 (later ~$62B as of August 2026), making it the most valuable public AI pure play in China. Fundamentals are catching up — H1 2026 revenue of ~$142M was up ~400% YoY with open-platform/API revenue up 28x — but the valuation swings are enormous. The bull case is Tsinghua pedigree, enterprise and government traction, and open-source leadership; the bear case is a public-market valuation that has run far ahead of current revenue and relentless competition from DeepSeek, Moonshot, and ByteDance.
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