Recently, Zhipu, a leading enterprise in China's artificial intelligence field, announced the successful completion of a new round of funding, with the funding amount reaching several billion yuan, and the company's valuation before the funding had already reached 20 billion yuan. This round of funding was led by Zhongguancun Science City Company, a market-oriented investment platform established by the Haidian District Government of Beijing.
Zhipu made no official response to this news. It is reported that this is the third round of funding Zhipu completed in 2024. Currently, Zhipu's shareholder list includes well-known investment institutions such as Hillhouse Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and Legend Capital, as well as internet giants such as Meituan, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi.
Zhipu's valuation has exceeded the 20 billion yuan mark, demonstrating its strong competitiveness in the AI model field. The company has made significant progress in commercialization and multimodal technology iteration. In the B-end market, Zhipu serves developers and enterprise customers through various models such as API services, cloud service private deployment, and local private deployment. According to public information in June, Zhipu's large model open platform BigModel has attracted more than 500,000 customers.
Zhipu's commercialization results in the B-end market are remarkable, and its revenue is in a leading position in the same industry. In the C-end market, Zhipu has also tried a subscription payment model. Its product "Zhipu Qingyan" video generation model "Qingying" attracted 1 million users within two weeks after the launch of paid membership services.
In terms of technological innovation, Zhipu launched upgraded versions of multimodal models, including a visual model that supports video and webpage understandingGLM-4V-Plus, a text-to-image model that supports image editingCogView-3-Plus, and an upgraded version of the large language modelGLM-4-Plus。
Zhipu is also actively building an upstream and downstream cooperation ecosystem, promoting industrial cooperation and technological innovation through investment strategies and the establishment of ecological funds. In December 2022, Zhipu determined its investment strategy, and in 2023 it tended to invest in "Tsinghua-affiliated" startups. In 2024, Zhipu further explored the incubator model and, together with ecosystem partners, launched the AGI ecological fund "Z Fund," with a fund size of 1 billion yuan.
Zhipu has shown strong development momentum in funding, model development, and business innovation, and is gradually building a powerful AI technology and industrial ecosystem.