Shares of Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC, which is also referred to as Zhipu, rose marginally on its Hong Kong debut, as the initial public offering of $558 million made it the first among Chinese “AI tigers” to go public.
The stock increased approximately 10 percent higher than the offer price of 116.20 Hong Kong Dollars ($15) on Thursday, and approximately 37.4 million shares were offered by the Beijing-based startup.
Zhipu was priced at HK$4.3 billion during its IPO, ranking it among the more significant AI flotations in the past few years. Zhipu, which is the first major large language model company in China to be listed via an IPO, was established in 2019 by scholars at one of the leading Chinese universities.
The listing also represents another important milestone in the overall process of artificial intelligence in China after a series of recent listings by AI chipmakers.
The company, which is firmly supported by Beijing, is regarded as one of the so-called “AI tigers” of Chinese startups that create big language models to compete with such systems such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
However, other prominent companies in the category would be Deepseek who shook markets early last year with the launch of one of its LLM models.
Although not as recognized internationally as Deepseek, Zhipu was featured by American AI powerhouse OpenAI last year as having made significant strides as a player on the front line of the Chinese race to dominate AI.
Therefore, the company is said to have offices in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, and throughout the Middle East. It also operates joint “innovation centers” projects across Southeast Asia, including in Indonesia and Vietnam.
The gains of Zhipu have been made despite being put on the U.S. Commerce Department Entity List in January last year, when U.S. officials claimed that it collaborated with the Chinese military.
The capacity of the firm to train its AI models has also been limited by the U.S. restriction in the availability of advanced semiconductor technology and expertise.
As per the prospectus provided by Zhipu, the company will utilize 70 percent of the IPO to conduct research and development of its general-purpose large AI models. The firm reported revenue of 312.4 million yuan in 2024.
Thus, Competitor Chinese AI start-up MiniMax is also set to release its own version on Friday, after an undisclosed submission last year.
