Z.ai
startupZ.ai (formerly Zhipu AI, rebranded internationally in July 2025) is one of China's "AI Tigers," originating from the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) at Tsinghua University. Co-founded in 2019 by Prof. Jie Tang and Prof. Li Juanzi, both Tsinghua CS faculty. Jie Tang is also the creator of AMiner, one of the world's largest academic search and mining systems, and vice director of BAAI.
Z.ai made history as the first major LLM-focused company to IPO, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX: 02513) on January 8, 2026, raising ~$560M. Pre-IPO funding totaled ~$1.5B from investors including Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, Meituan, and Saudi Prosperity7.
The cornerstone is the GLM (General Language Model) architecture, using a unique autoregressive blank-infilling objective (ACL 2022). ChatGLM-6B became one of the most popular open-source Chinese LLMs (37K+ GitHub stars), running on consumer GPUs with just 6GB VRAM. The series progressed through GLM-4, GLM-4.5, to GLM-5 (February 2026) — a 744B MoE trained entirely on 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B chips with zero NVIDIA dependency, a milestone for China's AI compute sovereignty.
People
- Jie Tang OpenReview — Co-founder & Senior PI (formerly Tsinghua University (KEG); AMiner creator)
- Li Juanzi OpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Tsinghua University (CS))
- Zhang Peng — CEO
- Liu Debing — Chairman
- Yuxiao Dong OpenReview — Senior Researcher
- Ming Ding OpenReview — Former Core Researcher (CogView; now at ByteDance)
- Aohan Zeng OpenReview — Core Researcher (GLM)
- Zhengxiao Du Google ScholarOpenReview — Core Researcher (GLM base model co-lead)
- Yuxuan Zhang GitHub — Core Researcher (CogVideoX)
News
- 2026-03-31 Zhipu's Losses Climb 60% After Chinese AI Rivalry Worsens — Bloomberg
- 2026-03-18 Chinese AI Developer Zhipu to Create New Unit for Product Development — The Information
- 2026-01-09 Zhipu and MiniMax IPO — ChinaTalk
- 2025-12-23 Zhipu AI's Rise from Tsinghua Lab — Pandaily
- 2025-10-14 Zhipu AI Breaks US Chip Reliance With First Major Model Trained on Huawei Stack — SCMP