Z.ai is a Beijing-based Chinese AI company known primarily for the GLM model family and its chatbot and agent platform under the Z.ai brand, offering language models, video models, APIs, and agent tools.
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.
Founders
Chinese computer scientist and Tsinghua University professor; creator of the Aminer knowledge graph and co-founder of Zhipu AI (Z.ai).
Chinese computer scientist and Tsinghua University professor specializing in NLP; co-founder of Zhipu AI.
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