Z.ai

Z.ai (officially: Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd.; formerly Zhipu AI / Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese technology company specialising in large language models and generative AI. It was founded on 11 June 2019 by Tsinghua University professors Tang Jie and Li Juanzi as a spin-off from the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) laboratory. The company is headquartered in the Haidian district of Beijing. Its CEO is Zhang Peng, a doctoral alumnus of Tsinghua. The firm is regarded as one of four to six Chinese "AI tigers." In July 2025, Zhipu AI rebranded internationally to Z.ai. On 8 January 2026, the company made its debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX: 2513), becoming the world's first major LLM company to list publicly, raising approximately $558 million at a valuation of roughly $6.6 billion USD. Its flagship product line is the GLM (General Language Model) series, available since 2021 and released as open-source under the MIT licence from July 2025. The portfolio also includes the AutoGLM agent, the Ying text-to-video model, CodeGeeX, CogVideoX, and the academic platform AMiner. In January 2025, the company was added to the US export control Entity List; the designation did not materially affect its operations. Z.ai maintains offices in Singapore, London, Dubai, and Malaysia, among other locations.