| Z.ai | |
|---|
| 智谱 | |
 | |
| Type | Public company (HKEX: 2513) |
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | June 11, 2019 |
| Founders | Tang Jie, Li Juanzi |
| Headquarters | Haidian District, Beijing, China |
| Key people | Tang Jie (Co-founder)
Li Juanzi (Co-founder)
Liu Debing (Chairman)
Zhang Peng (CEO) |
| Products | GLM (General Language Model) family, ChatGLM, GLM-4, GLM-4.5, GLM-4.6, GLM-4.7, GLM-5, GLM-5.1, CodeGeeX, AutoGLM, Ying, CogVLM, CogView, CogVideoX, GLM-Image, Zhipu Qingyan, MaaS Platform |
| Revenue | RMB 724 million (2025), up 131.9% YoY |
| Listed name | Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd. |
| IPO | Hong Kong Stock Exchange, January 8, 2026 |
| Employees | ~2,000 (2025) |
| Website | z.ai / zhipuai.cn |
Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (北京智谱华章科技有限公司), now operating under the parent entity Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd. and branded internationally as Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI until July 2025), is a Chinese artificial intelligence company specializing in large language models and generative AI. The company was founded in 2019 as a spinoff from Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) and is considered one of China's so-called "AI Tigers" alongside Moonshot AI, Baichuan Intelligence, MiniMax, StepFun, and 01.AI.[33] In January 2026 Z.ai became the first Chinese foundation model company to complete an initial public offering, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the ticker 2513.[19]
Z.ai develops the General Language Model (GLM) series, which includes GLM-130B, the ChatGLM family of open-weight chat models, the multimodal CogVLM and CogVideoX models, the CodeGeeX code generation suite, the AutoGLM mobile agent platform, and the flagship GLM-4, GLM-4.5, GLM-4.6, GLM-4.7, GLM-5, and GLM-5.1 foundation models. Industry analyses through 2025 and 2026 regularly placed the GLM family among the top open-weight model lines globally, along with offerings from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen team, and Moonshot AI's Kimi.[15]
History
Founding and early development, 2019 to 2022
Zhipu AI was founded on June 11, 2019 by Tsinghua University professors Tang Jie and Li Juanzi at the Tsinghua University Science Park in Beijing's Zhongguancun district.[1] The company originated from Tsinghua's Knowledge Engineering Group, a research lab that Li Juanzi continues to direct and that has also incubated other AI startups including Moonshot AI and DeepLang. The founders faced early challenges securing investment in a market that had not yet adopted the foundation model paradigm, and the administrative commission of Zhongguancun Science Park provided the team with three months of rent-free office space to help kickstart development.
The firm initially focused on knowledge graph technology, drawing on a long lineage of academic work from Tang Jie's group, including the AMiner academic search platform that he had been building since the mid-2000s. By late 2020 the team pivoted to large model AI, betting that a new generation of bidirectional pre-trained transformers would dominate Chinese-language natural language processing. The pivot was contemporaneous with the publication of the original GLM (General Language Model) algorithm paper at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in 2022, which introduced an "autoregressive blank infilling" pre-training objective that unified bidirectional understanding and left-to-right generation in a single architecture.
In late 2020 Zhipu developed the GLM pre-training architecture. By 2021 the team had completed training of the GLM-10B model with tens of billions of parameters. In 2022 the company developed and open-sourced GLM-130B, a 130-billion-parameter bilingual pre-training model supporting Chinese and English. GLM-130B was pre-trained on 400 billion tokens using a cluster of 96 NVIDIA DGX A100 (8 by 40 GB) nodes between May 6 and July 3, 2022, and was accepted to ICLR 2023.[2] Public benchmarks at the time indicated that GLM-130B matched or surpassed GPT-3 175B (davinci) on a wide range of English tasks and significantly outperformed Baidu's ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B across major Chinese benchmarks.[2] The release made GLM-130B one of the most capable openly available LLMs in the world during the brief window between BLOOM and Meta's LLaMA, and put Zhipu on the map as a serious foundation model lab.
ChatGLM and the rise of an AI Tiger, 2023
In 2023 Zhipu turned the GLM architecture into a consumer-facing chat assistant. ChatGLM-6B, an open-weight 6-billion-parameter chat model released on March 14, 2023, was the first widely downloadable Chinese instruction-tuned LLM with strong performance and quickly became one of the most downloaded models of the year on Hugging Face.[6] It supported local inference on a single consumer GPU and was rapidly fine-tuned by hobbyists, university labs, and enterprises across China. A larger ChatGLM model with hundreds of billions of parameters was offered as a paid API through the Zhipu Qingyan (智谱清言) consumer chatbot.
ChatGLM2-6B followed on June 25, 2023. Using a hybrid GLM objective and 1.4 trillion bilingual training tokens, it achieved substantial gains on MMLU, CEval, GSM8K, and BBH versus its predecessor, while extending the base context window from 2K to 32K tokens through FlashAttention. The release also introduced Multi-Query Attention, raising inference speed roughly 42 percent.
ChatGLM3-6B arrived on October 27, 2023 with a redesigned prompt format that natively supported function calling, code interpreter use, and complex agent tasks. The ChatGLM3-6B-Base variant achieved the strongest performance on standard reasoning, math, and code benchmarks among pre-trained models under 10 billion parameters at the time of release. By the end of 2023 the ChatGLM family had been downloaded more than 30 million times globally and was the dominant open Chinese chat model.[6]
During the same period, Zhipu and Tsinghua KEG also released CodeGeeX, an open multilingual code generation model trained on more than 850 billion tokens across 20-plus programming languages on a cluster of 1,536 Huawei Ascend 910 AI processors. CodeGeeX was published at KDD 2023, distributed as a free Visual Studio Code and JetBrains plug-in, and supported function-level completion, code translation, and code explanation.[7]
Series of fundraises and GLM-4, 2024
In January 2024 the company unveiled GLM-4, its next-generation flagship foundation model. GLM-4 introduced a 128K-token context window, native multimodal understanding spanning text, image, and video, and the "All Tools" agentic feature that allowed the model to autonomously use a web browser, a code interpreter, and image generation tools.[6] Internal benchmarks placed GLM-4 within striking distance of GPT-4 on Chinese reasoning, English MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval, and the model became the backbone of both the Zhipu Qingyan consumer app and the company's enterprise MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) platform.
In March 2024 CEO Zhang Peng publicly announced that Zhipu was developing a Sora-style text-to-video model as a step toward artificial general intelligence. The company debuted that system, branded "Ying" (清影, Qingying), in July 2024 with the ability to generate six-second video clips, and later open-sourced the underlying technology as CogVideoX, a DiT (diffusion transformer) family using a 3D causal variational autoencoder. CogVideoX-5B was released under an Apache 2.0 license, with CogVideoX v1.5 in late 2024 extending generation to 5-second and 10-second clips at 768p resolution and 16 frames per second.
Alongside model launches, Zhipu pursued a near-continuous fundraising campaign in 2024. A consortium of Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China) had contributed roughly 2.5 billion yuan in October 2023; in May 2024, Saudi Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures led a roughly 400 million dollar round that pushed the company's valuation to about 3 billion dollars. In December 2024 a Series D worth approximately 411 million dollars valued the company at around 2.8 billion dollars, with Alibaba and other corporates returning and Beijing and Shenzhen municipal funds taking minority stakes. The Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund and Zhuhai's state-owned Huafa Group emerged as among Zhipu's most influential backers.[29]
In October 2024 the company introduced AutoGLM, an autonomous agent that could operate smartphones via voice commands. AutoGLM was demonstrated executing multi-step workflows across more than fifty Chinese applications, including WeChat, Taobao, Meituan, Ctrip, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and the 12306 train ticketing platform. A subsequent upgrade extended task length to more than 54 steps and added integration with Alibaba Cloud for smartphone deployment.
US Entity List and rebrand to Z.ai, 2025
On January 16, 2025 the United States Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security added Zhipu AI and several affiliates to the U.S. Entity List under Section 744.11 of the Export Administration Regulations, citing the company's alleged role in advancing Chinese military AI capabilities.[8] The designation included a Footnote 4 marker, meaning that export license requirements applied not only to U.S.-origin items but also to foreign-produced items containing U.S. technology, software, or components under EAR jurisdiction. The action made Zhipu the first Chinese large model company added to the list.[31] Zhipu publicly rejected the allegations as lacking factual basis and stated that the listing would not materially impact its operations because the company did not rely on U.S. large-model technology.[9]
In response to the export controls, Zhipu accelerated its transition toward domestic compute. Engineers ported training and inference workloads to Huawei Ascend processors using the MindSpore framework, and signed broader partnerships with Huawei, Cambricon, and several state-backed cloud providers. The company also continued to raise money. A 257 million dollar Series D+ in March 2025 was led by Hangzhou Municipal Construction Investment and Zhuhai Huafa Group, while a roughly 140 million dollar strategic round in July 2025 brought in Shanghai's Pudong Venture Capital and Zhangjiang Group.[29] By mid-2025 Zhipu had received capital from the AI industry funds of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Zhuhai, illustrating how local governments across China were competing to back national AI champions.
In April 2025 Zhipu filed for IPO counseling with China International Capital Corporation, becoming the first of the AI Tigers to publicly disclose plans for a stock market listing. The company restructured from a foreign-invested limited liability company into a foreign-invested joint-stock company in preparation. Internally the entity adopted the trading name Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd., a literal English rendering of the parent company's revised Chinese name.
On July 28, 2025 Zhipu announced its global rebrand to Z.ai concurrent with the release of GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air.[11][13] GLM-4.5 is a 355-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts foundation model with 32 billion active parameters per forward pass.[12] The accompanying technical report on arXiv, titled "GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models" (arXiv:2508.06471), described an architecture that emphasized "deeper, not wider" with more layers and a smaller hidden dimension, used Grouped-Query Attention with partial Rotary Positional Embeddings and QK-norm, and trained on roughly 23 trillion tokens in multi-stage pretraining followed by reinforcement learning post-training.[5] GLM-4.5-Air offered a leaner 106-billion-parameter variant for edge deployments. Both were released under an MIT-style fully auditable open-source license with weights and training recipes published, and the API was priced at roughly 0.11 dollars per million input tokens and 0.28 dollars per million output tokens, undercutting DeepSeek and the major U.S. labs.[10]
In August 2025 Z.ai followed up with GLM-4.5V, a vision-language model based on GLM-4.5-Air that achieved state-of-the-art results across 42 public vision-language benchmarks among open models of its size. AutoGLM 2.0 launched the same month, positioned as the world's first cross-application mobile agent.
On September 30, 2025 the company released GLM-4.6, expanding the context window to 200,000 tokens and improving coding and reasoning.[14] GLM-4.6 reached the top of the LiveCodeBench v6 leaderboard for open models at 82.8 percent, scored 93.9 percent on the AIME 2025 mathematics benchmark in standard mode and 98.6 percent with tool use enabled, and posted 82.9 percent on GPQA with tools, essentially tied with Anthropic's Claude 4.5.[15] The release also marked the first public deployment of FP8 and Int4 quantization on Cambricon chips, broadening the model's deployable hardware footprint inside China. In September 2025 the company also offered explicit migration guides for users of Claude to switch to GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.6, capitalizing on Anthropic's tightening usage caps and access controls in some regions.[14]
December 2025 brought two major releases. On December 9, 2025 Zhipu open-sourced AutoGLM as a full mobile-agent framework powered by GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5V, the first such open release in the industry.[30] On December 22, 2025 the company shipped GLM-4.7, a coding-centric 355B/32B-active MoE model with a 200K context window and up to 128K-token outputs.[18] GLM-4.7 scored 87.4 percent on tau-squared bench (the highest reported score among open models), 84.9 percent on LiveCodeBench, 95.7 percent on AIME 2025, and 42.8 percent on Humanity's Last Exam, with a 41 percent improvement over GLM-4.6 on the latter.[15] Z.ai also released GLM-4.6V, a 106-billion-parameter open-weight vision-language model with native tool calling and a 128K context, plus a lightweight 9-billion-parameter GLM-4.6V-Flash variant.[17] Both were optimized for GUI agents and frontend automation.[16]
Hong Kong IPO and GLM-5, 2026
On January 8, 2026 Z.ai's parent company Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd. listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the ticker 2513.[20] The company issued 37.42 million H-shares at HK$116.20 per share, raising roughly 558 million U.S. dollars at a market capitalization of around HK$52.83 billion.[21] Knowledge Atlas opened at HK$120.00 and closed its first day up 13.1 percent at about HK$131.50, becoming the first of China's foundation-model AI Tigers to go public and the first publicly listed pure-play LLM company globally.[19] Zhipu's prospectus indicated that roughly 70 percent of IPO proceeds would be deployed into R&D for general-purpose large models, with the remainder allocated to commercialization and overseas expansion.[22] Demand was strong enough that the stock surged more than 700 percent above its IPO price during a sustained post-listing rally as investors rotated into Chinese AI assets following the global success of DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen series.
On January 14, 2026 Z.ai unveiled GLM-Image, a multimodal model that was the first state-of-the-art Chinese AI model trained end-to-end on Huawei Ascend hardware (the Atlas 800T A2 device) using MindSpore.[24] The release showcased Zhipu's ability to ship frontier models without any Nvidia silicon and validated China's domestic semiconductor stack for advanced AI workloads.[23] To achieve this, Z.ai engineers developed dynamic graph multi-level pipelined deployment, custom fusion operators tuned for Ascend's architecture, and multi-stream parallelism that overlapped communication with computation during distributed training.
On February 11, 2026 Z.ai released GLM-5, a 744-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 40 billion active parameters per token. GLM-5 reached 77.8 percent on SWE-bench Verified, 92.7 percent on AIME 2026, and 86.0 percent on GPQA-Diamond, beating Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 on coding while trailing Claude Opus 4.5 by roughly three points on SWE-bench Verified.[25] The full GLM-5 training run again used Huawei Ascend hardware with zero Nvidia dependency. Z.ai priced the GLM-5 API at $1.00 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output tokens, roughly five times cheaper on input and eight times cheaper on output than Claude Opus 4.6.[25] Following the release, Z.ai shares climbed alongside other Chinese AI stocks; in early February 2026, the company led a rally in the sector as investors anticipated a wave of new Chinese open-weight releases.
A brief pullback came later that month: after demand for GLM-5 exceeded inference capacity, Z.ai temporarily restricted new sign-ups to its API and the stock declined roughly 23 percent over a short period before stabilizing. Compute shortages remained a defining constraint of the Chinese AI sector through 2026, with state-led investment in additional Ascend and Cambricon production attempting to close the gap.
On April 8, 2026 Z.ai released GLM-5.1, an open-weight 754-billion-parameter agentic foundation model that set a new state of the art on SWE-Bench Pro with a score of 58.4, surpassing GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro. GLM-5.1 was designed for sustained autonomous task execution, capable of running on a single task for up to eight hours while completing the full loop from planning and execution through iterative optimization.[26] The release accompanied a 10 percent API price increase that the market absorbed without resistance, and the stock climbed roughly 11.5 percent in the days following the announcement. The company's first post-IPO earnings report, issued at the end of March 2026, disclosed that 2025 revenue reached 724 million yuan, up 131.9 percent year over year.[32] Open platform and API revenue rose 292.6 percent to 190 million yuan, the enterprise-grade intelligent agent business grew 248.8 percent to 166 million yuan, and traditional enterprise-deployed model revenue grew 70.5 percent to 366 million yuan. Net losses widened due to ongoing R&D spending, but the rate of revenue growth and breadth of customer adoption pushed Z.ai's shares up roughly 35 percent on the report.[28] By April 2026 the company served more than four million SMEs and developers across 218 countries and regions.[27]
Corporate structure and leadership
Founders and key personnel
Tang Jie is co-founder, controlling shareholder, and the central technical figure of Z.ai. A professor in Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science and Technology and director of the Foundation Model Research Center at Tsinghua's AI Institute, Tang is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI and serves as vice director of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), the non-profit research institute that produced the Wu Dao 2.0 model in 2021. Tang directly owns about 7.4 percent of the company and controls approximately 17.4 percent of voting rights through shareholding platforms.[22] He has personally mentored a generation of Chinese AI researchers, including two of Moonshot AI's founders.
Li Juanzi is co-founder and a professor in Tsinghua's Department of Computer Science and Technology, where she continues to direct the Knowledge Engineering Group. Beyond Zhipu, KEG has incubated DeepLang and Moonshot AI among other startups, making it one of the most prolific lab origins for Chinese AI ventures.
Liu Debing serves as chairman and co-controlling shareholder. With Tang Jie and other aligned stakeholders he is part of a control group that collectively holds about 37 percent of voting rights, since the company has no single majority shareholder.
Zhang Peng is the chief executive officer. He earned a doctorate in computer science from Tsinghua University and previously served as deputy director of the Science and Technology Big Data Research Center at Tsinghua's Institute of Data Science. Zhang has been the public face of Zhipu's strategic announcements, including the rebrand to Z.ai, the GLM-4 and GLM-4.5 releases, and the company's IPO.
Ownership and governance
| Role | Name | Voting interest (approx.) |
|---|
| Co-founder, controlling shareholder | Tang Jie | 17.4% |
| Chairman, co-controlling shareholder | Liu Debing | <1% direct; aligned with Tang |
| CEO, co-controlling group | Zhang Peng | Aligned with Tang and Liu |
| Aggregate concert party | Tang, Liu, Zhang, allies | ~37% |
The company has no single controlling shareholder, with a concert party of co-founders, executives, and early backers exercising collective control through an acting-in-concert agreement disclosed in the IPO prospectus.[22]
Products and technologies
Z.ai's product portfolio spans foundation models, multimodal models, code tools, autonomous agents, and a consumer chat app. The GLM-4 family and its successors anchor the lineup, with ChatGLM serving as the on-ramp for open-weight research deployments.[4]
GLM series
The General Language Model series is the company's flagship line of pre-trained models, descended from the GLM algorithm published at ACL 2022 and the GLM-130B paper accepted at ICLR 2023.
| Model | Release | Parameters | Notable features |
|---|
| GLM-10B | 2021 | ~10B | Early bilingual model, internal research |
| GLM-130B | August 2022 | 130B | Open bilingual model, matched GPT-3 175B, ICLR 2023 |
| ChatGLM-6B | March 14, 2023 | 6B | First open Chinese chat model, runs on consumer GPU |
| ChatGLM2-6B | June 25, 2023 | 6B | 32K context, Multi-Query Attention, +42% inference speed |
| ChatGLM3-6B | October 27, 2023 | 6B | Function calling, code interpreter, agent prompts |
| GLM-4 | January 2024 | Undisclosed | 128K context, multimodal, All Tools agent |
| GLM-4-Plus | August 2024 | Undisclosed | Enhanced reasoning and code |
| GLM-4-Voice | October 2024 | Undisclosed | End-to-end speech LLM |
| GLM-Z1 | 2025 | Not disclosed | Reasoning-focused model |
| GLM-4.5 / GLM-4.5 Air | July 28, 2025 | 355B (32B active) / 106B | MoE, MIT-style open weights, 23T-token training |
| GLM-4.5V | August 2025 | 106B class | SOTA on 42 vision-language benchmarks |
| GLM-4.6 | September 30, 2025 | 355B (32B active) | 200K context, Cambricon FP8/Int4 support |
| GLM-4.7 | December 22, 2025 | 355B (32B active) | 87.4 on tau^2 bench, persistent thinking blocks |
| GLM-4.6V / GLM-4.6V-Flash | December 9, 2025 | 106B / 9B | Native tool calling, 128K context, GUI agents |
| GLM-Image | January 14, 2026 | Not disclosed | First SOTA Chinese model fully trained on Huawei Ascend |
| GLM-5 | February 11, 2026 | 744B (40B active) | 77.8 SWE-bench Verified, trained on Ascend |
| GLM-5.1 | April 8, 2026 | 754B | SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro, 8-hour autonomous execution |
Key architectural choices across the modern GLM family include a Mixture-of-Experts core with sigmoid gates, Grouped-Query Attention with partial Rotary Positional Embeddings, QK-norm, MoE layers that double as multi-token prediction layers to enable speculative decoding, and an unusually deep configuration that uses roughly 2.5 times more attention heads than typical for similar hidden dimensions. Z.ai positions the models as agentic, reasoning, and coding foundation models, with a dual-mode operation that exposes a fast "non-thinking" path for low-latency queries and a deliberate "thinking" path for hard problems.[5]
AutoGLM
AutoGLM is the company's autonomous agent platform, first released in October 2024 and open-sourced as a full framework on December 9, 2025. AutoGLM uses GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5V (and later GLM-4.6 and GLM-4.6V) to perform on-device "phone use" tasks. Notable capabilities include:
- Voice and natural language control of complex multi-step workflows
- Sustained operation across more than 54 steps without human intervention
- Native support for major Chinese applications including WeChat, Taobao, Meituan, Ctrip, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and the 12306 train ticketing platform
- Cross-application orchestration capable of taking a single user goal and executing it across multiple apps
- Optional cloud execution for privacy-isolated computation
- Integration with Alibaba Cloud and downstream OEM device partnerships
AutoGLM 2.0 launched in August 2025 and was positioned as the world's first cross-app mobile agent. The open-source release in December 2025 made the framework available for community deployment, including local-only operation and integration with developer toolkits.[30]
Multimodal and vision
CogVLM and CogView were Zhipu's earlier vision-language and text-to-image models. CogVideoX, released in 2024 under an Apache 2.0 license, is a DiT-based open-source text-to-video model using a 3D causal variational autoencoder. CogVideoX-5B and the later CogVideoX v1.5 family support generation of 5-second and 10-second clips at 768p and 16 frames per second, with image-to-video variants. The Ying (清影) text-to-video assistant, launched in July 2024, generated six-second clips as Z.ai's consumer-facing video product. GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.6V extended the multimodal lineage into reasoning-capable VLMs, with GLM-4.6V adding native tool calling that lets a model pass screenshots, documents, and images directly to downstream tools without going through a text bottleneck.[16]
CodeGeeX is the company's family of code generation models, originating from a 13-billion-parameter pre-trained model trained on more than 850 billion tokens across 20-plus programming languages on a cluster of 1,536 Huawei Ascend 910 processors. Released as a free Visual Studio Code and JetBrains extension, CodeGeeX supports code completion, function-level generation, code translation, and code explanation. Surveys cited in the KDD 2023 paper indicated that 83.4 percent of users reported improved programming efficiency.[7] By 2025 the CodeGeeX tooling had been integrated with the GLM-4, GLM-4.6, and GLM-4.7 models, and Z.ai launched a Coding Plan that paired the GLM Coding API with popular agent harnesses including Claude Code, Cline, and Roo Code at roughly one-seventh the cost of Claude-equivalent throughput.
Zhipu Qingyan and consumer products
Zhipu Qingyan (智谱清言) is the company's consumer-facing AI assistant in mainland China, exposing the GLM family for conversation, document analysis, image generation, video generation, and agent workflows. As of January 2025 the app reported around 7 million monthly active users and total user counts in excess of 25 million. Premium subscriptions and feature gating generated more than 10 million yuan in annual recurring revenue in 2024. Internationally, Z.ai operates the chat.z.ai web product, which became the consumer entry point for GLM-4.6 and successor models outside China.
Other products
- GLM-4-Flash, a free API tier offering real-time web retrieval and long-context tasks
- GLM-4-Voice, an end-to-end speech LLM released in October 2024
- MaaS Platform, the company's enterprise Model-as-a-Service offering
- AMiner, the long-running academic search and knowledge graph platform maintained at Tsinghua
- GLM-Z1, a reasoning-focused 2025 model derived from the GLM-4 base
Funding and valuation
Z.ai raised roughly 1.5 billion U.S. dollars across more than a dozen funding rounds prior to its IPO. The investor base spans Chinese internet majors, prominent Chinese venture firms, Saudi sovereign capital, and a long list of state-backed municipal funds.
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead investors | Valuation |
|---|
| September 2022 | Series B | Undisclosed | Qiming Venture Partners | Undisclosed |
| October 2023 | Series B+ | ~$350 million (RMB 2.5B) | Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, HongShan | Undisclosed |
| May 2024 | Series C | $400 million | Prosperity7 Ventures (Saudi Aramco) | ~$3 billion |
| December 2024 | Series D | $411 million | Alibaba, Tencent, BAII | $2.8 billion |
| March 2025 | Series D+ | $257 million | Hangzhou Municipal Construction Investment, Huafa Group | ~$3 billion |
| July 2025 | Strategic | $140 million | Pudong Venture Capital, Zhangjiang Group | >$2.79 billion |
| January 8, 2026 | IPO (HKEX: 2513) | ~$558 million | Hong Kong public market | HK$52.83 billion mcap at debut |
Major pre-IPO investors include Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Ant Group, Meituan, Xiaomi, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Legend Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Prosperity7 Ventures, the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund, Zhuhai Huafa Group, Hangzhou Industrial Investment Group, Pudong Venture Capital, and Zhangjiang Group. The breadth of state-backed and corporate Chinese investors reflects Z.ai's status as a politically and commercially strategic asset within China's AI ecosystem.[29] The Hong Kong IPO drew strong oversubscription and continued upward share movement post-listing, with Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd. shares trading roughly seven times their offer price during the post-listing rally before settling at a still elevated multiple.[19]
Strategy and market position
Business model
Z.ai monetizes through three primary channels. Enterprise model deployments, mostly delivered on customer premises or on dedicated cloud infrastructure, accounted for roughly half of 2025 revenue. The company's open platform and API business, including the MaaS service that gives developers metered access to GLM models, grew nearly fourfold in 2025. The enterprise agent business, which packages GLM models with workflow integrations and verticalized tooling for sectors such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, more than tripled year over year. A consumer subscription business through Zhipu Qingyan and chat.z.ai contributes a smaller but growing share of revenue.[32]
China AI landscape and competitors
Z.ai operates inside a fiercely competitive Chinese AI sector and is consistently grouped with five other AI Tigers: Moonshot AI, Baichuan Intelligence, MiniMax, StepFun, and 01.AI.[33] Outside the Tigers, the company competes with the foundation model labs of Chinese internet majors and with stand-alone open-weight labs.
| Competitor | Notable models | Differentiator |
|---|
| DeepSeek | DeepSeek V3, R1, V4 | Aggressive cost efficiency and reasoning-first releases |
| Alibaba Qwen | Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3-Max-Thinking | Widest range of sizes from 0.5B to 397B, multilingual leadership |
| Moonshot AI | Kimi K1.5, K2, K2.5 | Long-context and agent swarms with up to 100 parallel sub-agents |
| Baichuan Intelligence | Baichuan series | Strong base models, slower agent push |
| MiniMax | MiniMax-Text, MiniMax-Video | Multimodal and video, IPO in 2026 |
| StepFun | Step series | Multimodal and video, Tencent-backed |
| Baidu Ernie | Ernie 4.5, X1 | Vertical integration with search and cloud |
| ByteDance Doubao | Doubao 1.5, 1.6 | Consumer chatbot scale and TikTok integration |
Industry analyses in 2025 and 2026 consistently placed Z.ai's GLM models among the top open-weight model lines globally. After GLM-5 launched in February 2026, Chinese labs collectively held four of the top five positions in open-weight AI according to widely cited leaderboards, with GLM-5 (Z.ai), Qwen3.5 (Alibaba), Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot AI), and DeepSeek V4 each leading in different capability dimensions.[15]
Compute sovereignty and Huawei alliance
The U.S. Entity List designation in January 2025 cut Zhipu off from Nvidia H100 and A100 GPUs and the broader U.S. accelerator supply chain. The company responded with a sustained push toward Huawei Ascend and Cambricon hardware. GLM-4.6's release in September 2025 included the first FP8 and Int4 quantization deployments on Cambricon. GLM-Image in January 2026 became the first state-of-the-art Chinese AI model trained end-to-end on Huawei Ascend processors using the MindSpore framework.[24] GLM-5 followed with a full training run on Ascend hardware. The achievement validated that China's domestic semiconductor and software stack could carry frontier-scale workloads, and made Z.ai a frequent reference in Chinese state media discussions of compute self-reliance.[23]
International strategy
Z.ai has built out regional headquarters, subsidiaries, and research centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Singapore, and Malaysia. The company has signed frontier AI safety commitments (the Seoul Commitments) alongside OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic, pledging to conduct red-teaming, publish frontier model transparency reports, and maintain internal security structures for frontier systems.[34] In 2025 the company organized a coalition with representatives from ten Belt and Road and ASEAN countries to help member states develop sovereign AI infrastructure based on the GLM open-weight stack, and offered explicit Claude-to-GLM migration paths for users priced out of or restricted from Anthropic's API.[35]
Partnerships and integrations
Z.ai has formed strategic partnerships across multiple industries, including:
- BioGeometry (February 2024) for multimodal models in life sciences and medical research
- BYOND ASIA for hyper-realistic digital humans in the entertainment industry
- Alibaba Cloud for deployment of AutoGLM agents on smartphones
- Huawei Technologies for adaptation of training pipelines to Ascend processors
- Honor and Intel for on-device model deployment in handsets and PCs
- Cambricon for FP8 and Int4 inference paths
- Multiple Chinese state cloud providers and ministries for sovereign deployments
Research and development
Z.ai's founding team and researchers have made major contributions to AI research. Key publications include the original GLM paper at ACL 2022, the GLM-130B paper at ICLR 2023, CodeGeeX at KDD 2023, the survey paper "ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools" in 2024 (arXiv:2406.12793), and the GLM-4.5 technical report "GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models" in 2025 (arXiv:2508.06471).[6] The research output has been organized through the THUDM and zai-org GitHub organizations, which host open-weight releases for GLM, ChatGLM, CodeGeeX, CogVLM, CogView, CogVideoX, GLM-V, and supporting tooling.[3]
Technical innovations
- Mixture-of-Experts architecture with sigmoid gating and very deep, narrow configurations that emphasize reasoning capacity per active parameter
- Multi-stage pretraining on multi-trillion-token bilingual corpora followed by expert-iteration reinforcement learning
- Long-context inference, with production support up to 200K tokens by GLM-4.6 and beyond
- Dual-mode "thinking" and "non-thinking" inference paths that preserve reasoning state across turns
- Native multimodal function calling in the GLM-V series, allowing images and documents to be passed directly to tools
- Custom Ascend and Cambricon training and inference operators, including fusion kernels and multi-stream parallelism for distributed training
- FP8 and Int4 quantization paths optimized for Cambricon and other domestic accelerators
Corporate philosophy
CEO Zhang Peng has stated that the company's mission is to achieve "super cognitive intelligence beyond human level" and has frequently described Z.ai as an AGI lab rather than a pure commercial AI vendor. An internal saying at the company holds that "no matter how much money we raise or how much money we make, it will be a hindrance on our road to AGI," framing both fundraising and revenue as means rather than ends. In September 2025 Zhang publicly cautioned that full artificial superintelligence remained unlikely by 2030, though he expected artificial general intelligence to emerge in limited domains by then, a more measured timeline than some Western lab leaders have offered.
See also
References
- Zhipu AI / Z.ai official website. https://z.ai and https://zhipuai.cn
- Zeng, A. et al. "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model." ICLR 2023. arXiv:2210.02414. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02414
- THUDM and zai-org GitHub organizations. https://github.com/THUDM and https://github.com/zai-org
- Z.ai Developer Documentation, GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.6 overviews. https://docs.z.ai
- "GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models." arXiv:2508.06471. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06471
- "ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools." arXiv:2406.12793. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12793
- Zheng, Q. et al. "CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Evaluations on HumanEval-X." KDD 2023. arXiv:2303.17568
- South China Morning Post, "Tech war: US adds Chinese AI unicorn Zhipu to trade blacklist before Biden's exit," January 2025. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3295002
- Global Times, "Chinese firm Zhipu expresses strong opposition to addition to US export control entity list," January 2025. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202501/1326995.shtml
- PR Newswire / Z.ai, "Z.ai Releases GLM-4.5, Setting New Standards for AI Performance and Accessibility While Improving Affordability," July 28, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zai-releases-glm-4-5--setting-new-standards-for-ai-performance-and-accessibility-while-improving-affordability-302514803.html
- Tech Startups, "China's AI startup Zhipu releases open-source GLM-4.5 to challenge OpenAI, rebrands as Z.ai," July 28, 2025. https://techstartups.com/2025/07/28/chinas-ai-startup-zhipu-releases-open-source-glm-4-5-to-challenge-openai-rebrands-as-z-ai/
- Pandaily, "Zhipu AI Launches GLM-4.5, an Open-Source 355B AI Model Aimed at AI Agents." https://pandaily.com/zhipu-ai-launches-glm-4-5-an-open-source-355-b-ai-model-aimed-at-ai-agents
- Computerworld, "Zhipu launches GLM-4.5 model as China ramps up open-source AI race." https://www.computerworld.com/article/4030336/zhipu-launches-glm-4-5-model-as-china-ramps-up-open-source-ai-race.html
- IntuitionLabs, "GLM-4.6: An Open-Source AI for Coding vs. Sonnet and GPT-5." https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/glm-4-6-open-source-coding-model
- Artificial Analysis, GLM-4.6 and GLM-4.7 model pages. https://artificialanalysis.ai
- VentureBeat, "Z.ai debuts open source GLM-4.6V, a native tool-calling vision model for multimodal reasoning." https://venturebeat.com/ai
- MarkTechPost, "Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4.6V: A 128K Context Vision Language Model with Native Tool Calling," December 2025. https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/12/09/zhipu-ai-releases-glm-4-6v-a-128k-context-vision-language-model-with-native-tool-calling/
- Business Wire, "Z.ai Open-Sources GLM-4.7," December 22, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251223393714/en/Z.ai-Open-Sources-GLM-4.7-a-New-Generation-Large-Language-Model-Built-for-Real-Development-Workflows
- CNBC, "The first of China's AI tigers goes public as Zhipu climbs in Hong Kong debut," January 8, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/08/china-ai-tiger-goes-ipo-zhipu-hong-kong-debut-openai-knowledge-atlas-hsi-hang-seng-listing.html
- PR Newswire / Z.ai, "China's AGI Pioneer and Leader Z.ai Listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange," January 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chinas-agi-pioneer-and-leader-zai-listed-on-hong-kong-stock-exchange-302656265.html
- Caixin Global, "Zhipu AI Seeks Up to US$640 Million in Hong Kong IPO," December 30, 2025. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2025-12-30/zhipu-ai-seeks-up-to-640-million-in-hong-kong-ipo-102398696.html
- HKEX, prospectus of Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd. (stock code 2513). https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/1230/2025123000017.pdf
- SCMP, "Zhipu AI breaks US chip reliance with first major model trained on Huawei stack," January 2026. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3339869/zhipu-ai-breaks-us-chip-reliance-first-major-model-trained-huawei-stack
- Bloomberg, "China's Zhipu Unveils New AI Model Trained on Huawei's Chips," January 14, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-14/china-s-zhipu-unveils-new-ai-model-trained-on-huawei-s-chips
- Medium / Maxime Labonne, "GLM-5: China's First Public AI Company Ships a Frontier Model." https://medium.com/@mlabonne/glm-5-chinas-first-public-ai-company-ships-a-frontier-model-a068cecb74e3
- MarkTechPost, "Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model." https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/04/08/z-ai-introduces-glm-5-1-an-open-weight-754b-agentic-model-that-achieves-sota-on-swe-bench-pro-and-sustains-8-hour-autonomous-execution/
- Bloomberg, "Zhipu Grows Revenue and Users on Path to China's First AI IPO," December 2, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-02/zhipu-grows-revenue-and-users-on-path-to-china-s-first-ai-ipo
- CNBC, "Shares of China AI tiger Zhipu surge 35% after revenue doubles in first earnings report," April 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/01/china-ai-tiger-zhipu-shares-surge-revenue-growth-first-earnings-report.html
- Caproasia, Zhipu AI funding round summaries, 2025. https://www.caproasia.com
- TechNode, "Zhipu AI open-sources AutoGLM, an AI agent model capable of full phone operation," December 9, 2025. https://technode.com/2025/12/09/zhipu-ai-open-sources-autoglm-an-ai-agent-model-capable-of-full-phone-operation/
- AIbase, "Zhipu AI Becomes the First Chinese Large Model Company Listed on the US Entity List." https://www.aibase.com/news/14749
- The Information, "Chinese AI Firm Zhipu's 2025 Revenue Jumps 132%." https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/chinese-ai-firm-zhipus-2025-revenue-jumps-132
- ChinaTalk and Recode China AI substack analyses of the AI Tigers ecosystem. https://www.recodechinaai.com
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "DeepSeek and Other Chinese Firms Converge with Western Companies on AI Promises." https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/01/deepseek-and-other-chinese-firms-converge-with-western-companies-on-ai-promises
- South China Morning Post, "China's Zhipu eyes expansion via Belt and Road Initiative as global AI market heats up." https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3310298
External links
