IPO News | Smart Spectrum Announced, “The World's First Big Model Stock” Is Here!

The Zhitong Finance App learned that the largest independent model manufacturer in China, Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Zhi Spectrum”), has taken the lead in hearing and officially submitted a prospectus through the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and is expected to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as the “world's first major model share”. This marks the first time that the capital market will welcome a listed company with the AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) base model as its core business.

It was founded in 2019 by Zhituo, transformed from Tsinghua University's technological achievements, and is positioned as an independent manufacturer focusing on basic model development. With the original GLM (General Language Model) pre-training architecture, a full-stack model matrix covering languages, codes, multi-modals and agents was constructed. The model was adapted to more than 40 domestic chips, and it is a rare domestic manufacturer that keeps pace with the world's top level on the technology route.

Zhipu is the first company in China to develop big models, and it is also a leading company in domestic big models. As of June of this year, the company's R&D personnel accounted for 74%. The core research team and academic advisory team have published 500 top high-impact papers, which have been cited more than 58,000 times. In addition to gathering current top domestic artificial intelligence talents, the company invests heavily in R&D. According to the prospectus, the company's R&D investment in 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 84.4 million, 528.9 million, and 2,195.4 billion, respectively. The R&D investment in the first half of 2025 was 1,594.7 billion, with a total R&D investment of about 4.4 billion yuan.

Huge R&D investment supports the rapid iteration of its technology, and GLM series models complete base iterations every 3-6 months. Its latest model is tied for number one with the world's top models for coding ability at the Code Arena. In particular, a key breakthrough was achieved in the model's coding ability. At Code Arena, a large-scale model arena recognized worldwide for blind testing by millions of users, GLM, Anthropic, and OpenAI models tied for number one in the coding world, surpassing the overseas closed source models Google Gemini and XAI's GROK, and was listed by OpenAI as the main global competitor in June of this year.

The commercialization of Smart Spectrum started early and has now become the largest independent large-scale model manufacturer with the largest revenue volume in China. The revenue mainly comes from big model revenue. The company uses the MaaS model, that is, it outputs intelligent capabilities to developers and enterprises through API calls. Since the launch of GLM-4.5/4.6 on OpenRouter, the world's largest supermarket, the number of calls has stabilized in the top 10 paid APIs in the world. The revenue of all domestic models exceeds that of all domestic models combined. According to the prospectus, Smart Spectrum Big Model has empowered 12,000 enterprise customers, more than 80 million end user devices, and over 45 million developers around the world. It is the largest independent general model manufacturer with the largest number of empowered terminal equipment in China.

With leading technology and business models, Zhipu has doubled its revenue for three consecutive years. According to the prospectus, revenue for 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 57.4 million, 124.5 million, and 312.4 million respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 130%. Revenue for the first half of 2025 was 190 million.

Revenue has grown rapidly, and gross margin has remained above 50%. According to the prospectus, gross margins for 2022, 2023, and 2024 were 54.6%, 64.6%, and 56.3%, respectively, and the gross margin for the first half of 2025 was 50%.

The original big model technology continues to lead. With its leading advantages such as largest revenue scale, high growth, and high gross margin, Zhipu has been recognized by many well-known investment institutions such as state-owned capital, industrial capital, and VC/PE since its establishment. Prior to the IPO, Zhipu had completed 8 rounds of financing, with a financing scale of over 8.3 billion yuan.

As the first company in the “Big Model Six Little Dragons” to launch an IPO, Zhipu went to Hong Kong to sprint for the “First Global Big Model Stock”, which is not only a milestone for the company itself, but also reflects the transformation of China's AI big model industry from “technology competition” to “capital verification.” Industry insiders pointed out that, on the one hand, intellect provides global investors with a pure target for sharing China's AI infrastructure technology dividends, which is expected to reshape the valuation logic of Chinese technology stocks in the capital market; on the other hand, it also indicates that China's big model industry will officially enter a new stage of development centered on technological strength, revenue capacity, and sustainable business models from early fanatical investment.