Z.ai, formerly known as Ziphu AI, the developer of the GLM family of large language models (LLMs), made its public market debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming, as investors describe, the world’s first publicly listed large language model company.
The company, which trades under the ticker 02513.HK, priced its shares at HK$116.20 apiece and opened at HK$120.00, giving it a market capitalisation of approximately HK$52.83 billion, or $6.8 billion. With the listing, the company raised roughly $558 million, according to a press release from Qiming Venture Partners, one of the company’s early backers.
Founded in 2019, Z.ai develops open-weight LLMs (allowing users to customise models for specific tasks) that, across multiple benchmarks, have matched or exceeded the performance of both open-source and proprietary models from the United States, while competing closely with Chinese peers such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen series.
Qiming Venture Partners claimed, “Z.ai has grown into China’s largest independent large language model developer.” The firm added that, as of September 30, 2025, Z.ai’s models were deployed across more than 12,000 enterprise customers, over 80 million end-user devices, and supported more than 45 million developers globally—making it the independent general-purpose large-model provider in China with the highest number of enabled end-user devices.
Zhang Peng, CEO of Z.ai, said in a statement, “Going public means we must shoulder even greater social responsibility and industry mission.”
He added that the company will continue to focus on “fully independent, controllable full-stack large-model technology,” while pushing forward improvements in reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities across the GLM model series.
Z.ai is listed under Hong Kong’s Chapter 18C (Specialist Technology Companies) regime, implying higher volatility and valuation uncertainty compared with profitable semiconductor issuers, as revealed in the IPO prospectus.
While revenue grew rapidly to RMB 312.4 million (≈ HK$345 million, or $42 million) in 2024 (130%+ CAGR since 2022), the company reported net losses of RMB 2.96 billion (≈ HK$3.28 billion, or $420 million) in 2024, largely driven by heavy R&D spending.
Around 70% of IPO proceeds are earmarked for continued large-model R&D rather than capacity expansion or near-term commercialisation, unlike hardware peers raising capital for fabs, chips, or servers.
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