Most Chinese AI labs in 2019 were either copying or fine-tuning someone else's model. A small team walking out of a Tsinghua University laboratory decided to write their own architecture instead — and bet the company that it would still matter seven years later.
A lab, not a startup, first
Zhipu (智谱) was founded in 2019 in Beijing as a technology-transfer spinout from Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) lab. The founding team reads like a faculty roster: CEO Zhang Peng (张鹏), chief scientist Tang Jie (唐杰) — a Tsinghua professor who led the GLM-130B project — and chairman Liu Debing (刘德兵). Tang Jie is the academic face; Zhang Peng runs engineering and commercialization.
The defining early choice was architectural. Instead of the dominant GPT-style autoregressive stack, Zhipu backed GLM, a general language model built on an autoregressive blank-infilling pretraining paradigm. In 2021 the company released the GLM framework; in 2022 it open-sourced GLM-130B, a hundred-billion-plus-parameter bilingual model and one of the first open Chinese foundational models at that scale.
The "Chinese OpenAI" label
Zhipu leaned into research-mode product discipline rather than consumer-app marketing. In 2023 it released ChatGLM-6B, an early open-source dialogue model that drew a large GitHub and Hugging Face following. It followed with the GLM-4 family and, by late 2025, GLM-4.7, which the company says reached the top of several open-model benchmarks.
The architecture has also been adapted to more than 40 domestic chips — a deliberate sovereignty move in a market wary of export controls. That breadth, Zhipu argues, is what keeps the model runnable if overseas hardware or APIs become unavailable.
The listing that made it a number
On 8 January 2026 Zhipu listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under code 02513.HK, pricing at HK$116.20 and raising more than HK$4.3 billion (≈ US$550M). It billed itself as the world's first publicly listed company built on a general AI (AGI) base model — "the global large-model first stock." Market cap opened around HK$52–57 billion (≈ US$6.7–7.3B).
The financials behind the debut show a research-first company still buying growth with losses. Revenue was 312.4 million yuan (≈ US$44M) in 2024 and 191 million yuan (≈ US$27M) in the first half of 2025, up 325% year on year. R&D spending was 2.195 billion yuan (≈ US$310M) in 2024 alone, and cumulative R&D across 2022–2025 reached about 4.4 billion yuan (≈ US$620M); roughly 74% of staff are researchers.
Why the founders matter more than the IPO
The interesting question is not the market cap but the bet. Zhang Peng and Tang Jie kept Zhipu on a self-developed path when cloning a foreign model would have been faster and cheaper. That bought independence — GLM runs on domestic silicon — but also a heavy cost burden and a long road to profitability.
Tang Jie, as chief scientist, anchors the academic credibility; Zhang Peng, as CEO, has to turn a research lab's output into a business that pays for the next model. The pairing is Zhipu's core asset and its core risk: if the architecture stops leading, the whole premium compresses.
What readers can do now
- If you build on Chinese models, test GLM on a domestic-chip endpoint and compare latency against a Western model; the 40+ chip adaptation is the part worth verifying yourself.
- If you report on AI, read Zhipu's R&D-to-revenue ratio as a proxy for how much China's model builders are spending to stay independent.
- If you invest, separate the "first stock" narrative from the loss trajectory; the listing funds R&D, it does not end the burn.
Honest limitations
Facts on founding (2019, Beijing, Tsinghua KEG spinout), leadership (CEO Zhang Peng, chief scientist Tang Jie, chairman Liu Debing), architecture (GLM, 2021 framework, GLM-130B open-sourced 2022, ChatGLM-6B 2023, GLM-4.7 late 2025) and 40+ domestic-chip adaptation come from Zhipu materials and China Daily / 证券时报 (Securities Times) coverage. HKEX listing (8 Jan 2026, code 02513.HK, HK$116.20 issue price, >HK$4.3B raised, ~HK$52–57B market cap, "global large-model first stock") is from China Daily and 证券时报. Revenue (312.4M yuan in 2024; 191M yuan 1H2025, +325%) and R&D (2.195B yuan in 2024; ~4.4B yuan cumulative 2022–2025; 74% R&D staff) are from the IPO prospectus as reported by 证券时报. Tang Jie's role as GLM-130B principal investigator and Tsinghua professor is widely reported. "Chinese OpenAI" is a media description, not a company claim. Listing valuation is a market figure; RMB converted at ~7.1/US$ and HKD at ~0.128/US$. Not investment advice.