Zhipu AI

Zhipu AI is an AI company co-founded by Tang Jie and Zhang Peng, with roots in Tsinghua's NLP and knowledge-graph research . Founded in 2019, it was the earliest entrant among what became known as China's "six little tigers" of large-model startups, initially focused on natural-language processing and knowledge-graph mapping before pivoting to general-purpose LLMs . The company launched its ChatGLM dialogue bot on the same day GPT-4 was released, offering invite-only beta access to a 100-billion-parameter model . Its investor base has mixed "red-blooded" RMB-fund credentials—CSC Group, Legend Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund, the last of which Qiming itself helps manage . Zhipu AI and MiniMax both filed for Hong Kong IPOs in early January 2026, with Zhipu positioning itself as the "first global large-model stock" .