Chinese AI startup Zhipu announced a strategic investment of RMB 1 billion ($140 million) from Shanghai’s Pudong VC and Zhangjiang Group at its July 2 ecosystem conference, advancing its IPO plans. Zhipu, backed by Tsinghua University and one of China’s leading AI firms, began IPO counseling in April and has already raised over RMB 10 billion ($1.4 billion), reaching a valuation above RMB 20 billion ($2.79 billion). Founded in 2019, Zhipu was China’s first startup to release a proprietary large language model. Its app now has 25 million users. Beyond enterprise services — serving clients such as Deloitte, auto group SAIC, and milk giant Mengniu — Zhipu is embedding AI into devices with partners including Xiaomi, Honor, and Samsung. At the event, Zhipu also launched GLM-4.1V-Thinking, a new multimodal model which the company says features stronger reasoning, and unveiled an agent aggregation platform aimed at speeding up AI deployment across industries. [Caixin, in Chinese]
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