Zhipu AI ramps up overseas expansion strategy ahead of IPO

China's Zhipu AI is ramping up its overseas expansion through a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, an executive said on Wednesday, as the startup prepares for an initial public offering.

The Beijing-headquartered startup is pitching governments globally to help them launch localised sovereign AI agents, vice-president Carol Lin told an audience at tech conference GITEX Asia.

The company now has offices in the Middle East, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, and is running joint "innovation centers" across Asia, including in Indonesia and Vietnam, she said.


Founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spinoff, Zhipu AI has emerged among China's front-runners in the artificial intelligence race, alongside AI-focused startups Moonshot AI, Minimax, 01.AI, and Baichuan, while also competing with tech giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba.

It initiated preliminary steps toward an initial public offering this month, according to filings posted on the Chinese securities regulator's website, aiming to become the first of China's emerging AI companies to go public. The company secured three rounds of state-backed funding within weeks in March, including a 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) investment from the Chengdu municipal government.

Zhipu was added to the U.S. Commerce Department's export control entity list in January, barring it from procuring U.S. components.

An advertisement for Zhipu's GLM shown during the presentation depicted a foreigner arriving in Beijing and using the firm's AI agent to send a WhatsApp message and search on Google Maps and Reddit for Beijing recommendations.