A bell rang on the Hong Kong exchange floor at half past nine. The louder noise was in the order book, where ordinary investors had fought for far more shares than actually existed. The company behind the bell, Zhipu (智谱), had posted a loss in every year it had existed — and the market still could not get enough.
On 8 January 2026, Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (北京智谱华章科技股份有限公司) began trading on the HKEX main board under ticker 02513.HK. It priced its IPO at HK$116.20 per share and issued 37.42 million H-shares, raising HK$4.3 billion (≈ US$550M) before the greenshoe. The listing is being called the world's first public offering by a company whose core business is an AGI foundation model — what China calls a large model (大模型).
Why "first" actually matters
For two years the open question around Chinese AI labs was simple: who would reach public markets first? The usual names — MiniMax, Moonshot, StepFun (阶跃星辰), Baichuan (百川) — were all privately held. Zhipu got there by converting a research lineage into a product line fast enough to clear exchange scrutiny.
Spun out of Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) in 2019, Zhipu built its name on the GLM architecture, an autoregressive "fill-in-the-blank" pretraining paradigm. It shipped China's first 10-billion-parameter model (GLM-10B), the first open-source hundred-billion model (GLM-130B), and the first device-control agent. By listing time its GLM-4.7 flagship topped open-source and domestic rankings on coding benchmarks such as CodeArena.
The "first large-model IPO" label is more than a ribbon. It sets a valuation reference for every private Chinese model company still waiting in line.
What the money buys
The HK$4.3B haul was not a token raise. Zhipu said roughly 70% of proceeds will go into large-model R&D. That tracks its history: cumulative R&D spend through June 2025 reached about RMB 4.4 billion (≈ US$620M), with 2024 alone at RMB 2.20 billion (≈ US$310M) and the first half of 2025 at RMB 1.59 billion (≈ US$224M).
Revenue is growing but thin. Reported figures: RMB 57.4M (2022), RMB 125M (2023), RMB 312M (2024), and RMB 190M (≈ US$27M) in H1 2025. That is a healthy triple-digit growth rate on a small base — not yet a business that funds itself.
The investor map
The IPO drew an unusually dense cornerstone roster: 11 institutions committed HK$2.98 billion (≈ US$382M), about 70% of the offer. They ranged from Beijing state-backed capital and insurance giants (Taikang, 泰康人寿) to mutual funds (GF Fund, 广发基金) and private names such as Perseverance Asset Management (高毅).
Before the listing, Zhipu completed 8 financing rounds totalling over RMB 8.3 billion (≈ US$1.17B). Its final pre-IPO round, a B6 tranche closed in May 2025, implied a post-money valuation of RMB 24.38 billion (≈ US$3.4B). The cap table reads like a map of Chinese internet power: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团), Tencent (腾讯), Meituan (美团), Alibaba (阿里) and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun (雷军) all appear, alongside state vehicles such as the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund and Hangzhou city-investment funds.
The losses behind the valuation
Here is the tension every buyer had to price. Zhipu's net losses widened every year: RMB 143.7M (2022), RMB 788M (2023), RMB 2.96B (2024), and RMB 2.36B (≈ US$332M) in H1 2025. Total debt climbed past RMB 11.25 billion (≈ US$1.58B) by mid-2025. The company is explicit that losses stem from R&D investment and that it has "not yet formed self-sustaining cash generation."
That is the standard profile of a frontier-model lab. What is unusual is that it is now a public, quarterly-reported one — answerable to shareholders who can sell in seconds.
A venue choice worth noting
Hong Kong, not Shanghai's STAR Market, was the chosen venue. That is a signal these companies want international capital and a lighter pre-profit path than the A-share boards allow. The book was emphatic: the Hong Kong public tranche was oversubscribed 1,159 times and the international tranche 15.28 times. Day-one trade opened at HK$120 and peaked near a market cap of HK$57B+ (≈ US$7.3B) before settling.
Honest limitations
- Figures come from the prospectus as reported by Shanghai Securities News, China Daily and China Financial News. Post-listing market-cap levels are volatile; the day-one peak was an intraday mark, not a settled value.
- The pre-IPO valuation (RMB 24.38B post-money) is a round-level figure from the prospectus; it is a negotiation outcome, not an independent appraisal.
- Revenue and loss numbers are company-reported in the filing and are not re-audited in this summary.
- Rankings such as "open-source #1" reflect benchmark lists the company cited; such rankings shift month to month.
What readers can do now
- Track the cornerstone lock-up. The HK$2.98B cornerstone block is locked for six months; watch the expiry window for potential supply pressure on the stock.
- Benchmark private peers. Use Zhipu's pre-IPO value (≈ US$3.4B) as a yardstick whenever MiniMax, Moonshot or StepFun disclose a funding round or valuation.
- Watch the R&D-to-revenue gap. A narrowing gap between RMB 4.4B cumulative R&D and still-small but growing revenue is the real signal that a model business can pay for itself.