Qiming Venture Partners’ portfolio company Z.ai (formerly known as Zhipu AI), a pioneer and leader inartificial general intelligence (AGI) in China, successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8th, 2026, Beijing time, becoming the world’s first listed large language model company.
Z.ai (02513.HK) issued shares at a price of HK$116.20 per share and opened at HK$120.00 per share with a market capitalization of HK$52.83 billion.
Qiming Venture Partners co-led Z.ai’s Series B1 financing round in early 2022, nearly a year before ChatGPT was released and sparked the global wave of large models. This funding was instrumental in supporting Z.ai to overcome R&D challenges and complete its first 100-billion-parameter large model, GLM. Qiming continued to support the company in its subsequent B2& B4funding round. Under Chapter 18C of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Qiming stands as Z.ai’s experienced independent investor.
Z.ai was founded in 2019 as a commercialization of technological achievements from Tsinghua University. With the mission “to make machines think like humans”, the company has remained dedicated to AGI research and development. Since its inception, Z.ai has launched China’s first 10-billion-parameter model, its first open-source 100-billion-parameter model, its first conversational model, its first multimodal model, and the world’s first device-control AI agent. It has built one of the world’s most advanced and comprehensive model portfolios and AI agent products.
GLM achieves breakthrough in full domesticization, supports over 40 domestic chips, becoming one of the most versatile model architectures in the industry. Its latest flagship model,GLM-4.7, has delivered top-tier performance among open-source models across multiple mainstream public benchmarks. In CodeArena, an authoritative coding evaluation system with global participation from a million users in blind testing, GLM-4.7 ranks first among open-source models and first among domestic models, surpassing GPT-4. Additionally, on the highly authoritative AA AI Index, the model also secured first place among open-source models and first among domestic models. The released GLM Coding Plan has already gained 150,000 users globally, establishing itself as a primary programming model solution for Chinese developers.
Today, Z.ai has grown into China’s largest independent large language model developer. Its GLM series of models are applied across various sectors including public governance, industrial manufacturing, energy and power, finance, internet, communications, consumer electronics, and education. As of September 30, 2025, Z.ai’s models had empowered over 12,000 enterprise customers, more than 80 million end-user devices, and over 45 million developers worldwide, making it the independent general-purpose large-model vendor in China with the highest number of enabled end-user devices.
Zhang Peng, CEO of Z.ai, stated:“Listing in Hong Kong represents a landmark milestone for Z.ai. Our journey—from commercializing research outcomes at Tsinghua’s labs to becoming a publicly listed company—has never strayed from our original vision: ‘to make machines think like humans’. Going public means we must shoulder even greater social responsibility and industry mission. Moving forward, Z.ai will continue to deepen our commitment to fully independent, controllable full-stack large model technology, relentlessly push the boundaries of AGI capabilities, and consistently enhance the reasoning, coding, and multimodal performance of the GLM model series. We are dedicated to building a more open and thriving AI ecosystem, empowering thousands of industries through accessible and inclusive technology, and making General Artificial Intelligence a genuine productive force for the advancement of human civilization.”
Alex Zhou, Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, said, “The Z.ai team combines deep conviction in its technical roadmap with a rare ability to consistently translate frontier research into real commercial value. This dual strength—a strong belief in technology coupled with disciplined industrial execution—gives us confidence that the company will navigate the AI wave with resilience and emerge as a category leader. Z.ai’s successful IPO is not only a critical validation of China’s path in foundational AI innovation, but also sends a clear signal to the broader technology investment community: in the long run, the market recognizes and rewards teams that stay committed to frontier exploration and deep, foundational technological breakthroughs. We look forward to Z.ai building on this milestone and continuing to drive innovation in large language model technology and real-world applications, creating even greater value for the AI ecosystem.”
