Alibaba-Backed AI Startup Zhipu Plans IPO This Year

Zhipu, a Chinese AI startup backed by Alibaba and Tencent, is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) this year. The company has enlisted China International Capital Corp (CICC) to lead the listing and may file for approval by October.

Founded six years ago, Zhipu is one of China’s contenders in the race to compete with the likes of OpenAI. It has rapidly launched low-cost AI tools alongside rivals like Moonshot and Minimax.

Zhipu reportedly raised 1 billion yuan (about $137 million) from state-backed investors, highlighting growing support from the Chinese government. Industry leaders, including Kai-Fu Lee, believe only a few Chinese AI models will survive the competition, with Zhipu aiming to be one of them.

In March, Zhipu AI introduced AutoLM Rumination, an AI agent built for deep research, detailed report generation, and task planning. The tool is free to use and powered by Zhipu’s proprietary models, which the company claims perform on par with DeepSeek R1.

Zhipu also claims the model is eight times faster and requires just one-thirtieth of the computational resources compared to similar systems.

Just weeks earlier, another Chinese firm released Manus AI, a general-purpose AI agent that drew attention after outperforming OpenAI’s research tool on the GAIA benchmark, a test focused on solving real-world problems.

AIM has previously written extensively about the AI ecosystem in China. Companies like Alibaba and Tencent are unveiling new AI models at an extraordinary pace. 

Recently, Alibaba introduced QwQ 32B, an AI model with 32 billion parameters. However, it is reported to achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1, which has 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated parameters).