Z.ai

About Z.ai

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Z.ai

All products by Z.ai reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

Z.aiAI Chatbots

AI chatbot and agent powered by GLM-5.2

Free6.7/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Z.ai

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Z.ai's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Z.ai competes with, and how they differ.

Mistral AI7.7/10

Mistral develops its own foundation LLMs (Mistral Large, Mixtral) and offers a chat product plus API/on-prem deployment, directly comparable to Z.ai's GLM models as a foundation-model-first lab rather than an application-layer chatbot builder.

2 products reviewed on TopReviewed

xAI7.8/10

xAI builds the Grok family of foundation models with its own chat interface, competing with Z.ai at the base-model research level rather than as a customer-service or business chatbot platform.

2 products reviewed on TopReviewed

Character Technologies, Inc.6.8/10

Character.AI focuses on consumer persona-based conversational entertainment on top of its own models, a narrower consumer use case compared to Z.ai's general-purpose GLM models aimed at both research and enterprise API use.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

DeepSeek7.6/10

DeepSeek is another China-based lab building and open-sourcing its own foundation LLM series (DeepSeek-V/R), the closest direct peer to Z.ai in terms of independent model development, open-weight releases, and low-cost API pricing rather than a downstream chatbot-building tool.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Z.ai's history, with sources.

1. Jul 17, 2026Milestone

   Renamed from Knowledge Atlas Technology to Z.AI Co., Ltd.

   Changed its registered English name from Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Company Limited to Z.AI Co., Ltd. and its HKEX stock short name from KNOWLEDGE ATLAS to Z.AI, aligning its listed legal identity with its Z.ai product brand; the Chinese name and stock code (2513) were unchanged.

   finance.biggo.com
2. Jul 13, 2026Funding

   Completed ~$4.0B H-share placement

   Priced and completed a follow-on H-share placement of 19.78 million shares at HK$1,588 each (~HK$31.4B / $4.0B gross), to fund GLM model development and computing infrastructure.

   finance.biggo.com
3. Jan 8, 2026Milestone

   IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (2513.HK)

   Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the name Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC (ticker 2513), raising over HK$4.3 billion (~$552-558M) and becoming, per press accounts, the world's first large-language-model developer to go public; shares closed up over 12% on debut.

   yicaiglobal.com
4. Jul 28, 2025Launch

   Released GLM-4.5 and rebranded internationally as Z.ai

   Released GLM-4.5, a 355B-parameter MIT-licensed mixture-of-experts model for reasoning, coding and agentic tasks, and rebranded its international identity from Zhipu AI to Z.ai to reflect its global expansion.

   techstartups.com
5. Mar 19, 2025Funding

   Raised ~1.8B yuan in state-backed funding spree

   Government-backed investment vehicles from Chengdu (300M yuan / $41.5M), Zhuhai's Huafa Group (500M yuan) and the Hangzhou Municipal Construction Investment Group (1B yuan) invested, part of a wave of Chinese local-government AI funding.

   itiger.com
6. May 31, 2024Funding

   Raised $400M round incl. Saudi Arabia's Prosperity7 Ventures at ~$3B valuation

   Saudi Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures joined a $400 million financing round alongside existing backers Alibaba and Tencent — the first known foreign investor in a major Chinese generative-AI company — valuing Zhipu at approximately $3 billion.

   gulfnews.com
7. Oct 20, 2023Funding

   Raised 2.5 billion yuan (~$342M) led by Alibaba and Tencent

   Alibaba and Tencent led a 2.5-billion-yuan (~$342M) round alongside Ant Group, Xiaomi, Meituan and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), part of a wave of Chinese Big Tech capital backing domestic large-model startups.

   finance.yahoo.com
8. March 2023Launch

   Open-sourced ChatGLM-6B

   Released ChatGLM-6B, a 6.2-billion-parameter open bilingual (Chinese/English) dialogue model that could run on consumer-grade GPUs, alongside the ChatGLM chat service; it became one of the most-downloaded Chinese-language open models of 2023.

   github.com
9. 2019Founded

   Founded as a Tsinghua University Knowledge Engineering Group spin-out

   Zhipu AI (now Z.ai) was founded in Beijing in 2019 by Tsinghua University professor Tang Jie, spinning out of the university's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) lab.

   yicaiglobal.com