Z.ai

Z.ai develops the GLM family of language and multimodal models for developers and enterprises. Its offerings include APIs, open-weight models and enterprise deployments for coding, reasoning, document analysis and agents that use tools to complete multistep tasks. The broader product family covers image and video generation, speech recognition and translation; its slide and poster agent turns natural-language instructions into content and visual layouts.

Founded as Zhipu AI in 2019, the company grew out of Tsinghua University’s Knowledge Engineering Group, with professors Tang Jie and Li Juanzi among its founders. Zhang Peng is CEO, and the international Z.ai brand dates to 2025. Its research foundations include GLM’s autoregressive blank infilling: the Tsinghua-associated team combined prediction of missing text spans with two-dimensional positional encoding, enabling one pretrained model to support both language understanding and generation.

Zhipu AI completed its Hong Kong listing in January 2026 and raised approximately HK$31.41 billion (US$4 billion) through a subsequent share placement in July. Its business centers on selling models and AI services to other businesses. In July 2026, Z.ai was reportedly on track for US$1 billion in annual recurring revenue.