Decoding China’s genAI duel as it shifts toward IPO arena

Two of China’s most valuable generative AI startups are racing to go public, marking the first test for China’s large language model (LLM) developers as to whether they can turn technical prowess into investor confidence.

Beijing-based Zhipu AI, valued at 40 billion yuan (US$5.6 billion) and known internationally as Z.ai, has filed preliminary documents for an IPO. The company is reportedly shifting its IPO from mainland China to Hong Kong.

MiniMax, the Shanghai-based AI lab behind popular app Talkie, is targeting a listing in Hong Kong as early as this year. The company is valued at around US$4 billion after a funding round in July. It plans to raise between HK$4 billion and HK$5 billion (US$510 million to US$637 million) through the IPO, Reuters reported.

The two companies are among China’s so-called “AI tigers,” fast-growing AI labs backed by the local government and the country’s major tech firms like Alibaba and Tencent.

These tigers are now seeking access to deeper capital pools as domestic funding for Chinese LLM projects appears to be cooling off.

“It will be the first truly listed AI asset in China that is open to the world,” a Shanghai-based venture investor tells Tech in Asia, referring to MiniMax’s planned IPO in Hong Kong.

As for Zhipu AI, the person believes that it may still opt for a mainland listing, as the company is viewed as one of Beijing’s “core assets.”

Zhipu AI: A lab-born challenger

Founded in 2019 by computer scientists Tang Jie and Li Juanzi, Zhipu AI originally emerged from a research lab at Tsinghua University, China’s top school for AI talent. The firm now has about 500 employees and has raised US$1.4 billion over 12 rounds, according to Tracxn. 

Zhipu AI has developed a suite of text and video generation models, offered through its consumer-facing Z.ai platform and a B2B model-as-a-service platform.

Tang, who serves as Zhipu AI’s chief scientist, is also a professor at Tsinghua University. He previously taught Zhang Peng, Zhipu AI’s CEO, and Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI – which is behind Kimi K2 Thinking, a model that the company claims to have outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5. 

That background helps explain why Zhipu AI is viewed as one of China’s top contenders in the AI race with the US. In June, OpenAI singled it out as “China’s answer” to offering AI infrastructure to non-Western markets.

MiniMax’s low-cost play

Fast-track to IPO?