Zhipu AI, one of China’s leading foundational model startups, has kicked off preparations for an IPO, making it the first of China’s six AI unicorns to pursue a listing, as the sector begins to diverge under competition from entrants like DeepSeek. Spun from Tsinghua University’s Department of Computer Science in 2019, Zhipu began focusing on large language model research in 2020. That foundation led to the launch of open-source conversational model ChatGLM and its lightweight single-GPU variant ChatGLM-6B. Zhipu has since built a broad portfolio of AI-native products, including the productivity assistant Qingyan, the code-generation model CodeGeeX, the multimodal model CogVLM, and the text-to-image model CogView. On April 15, Zhipu open-sourced its new GLM 32B/9B series under the MIT license.