Hangzhou State-owned Assets First Investment selected Beijing's Zhipu as the 'Six Little Tigers'.

"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" March 3rd News (Reporter Li Mingming) Recently, Hangzhou, which has been widely followed, has started to bet on the second DeepSeek.

Recently, the large-scale model unicorn Zhiju completed a new round of strategic financing with an amount exceeding 1 billion yuan, with participating investors including Hangzhou Chengtou Industrial Fund, Shangcheng Capital, etc., aiming to promote the technological innovation and ecological development of the domestic GLM large-scale model of Zhiju.

It is reported that with the cutting-edge artificial intelligence and large-scale model technology, financing will help Zhipu better serve the vibrant economic entities in Zhejiang Province and the Yangtze River Delta region, comprehensively promote the digital industrial transformation and upgrading based on artificial intelligence technology.

The reporter of the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily noticed that on December 17th last year, Zhipu announced the completion of a 3 billion yuan financing, less than 3 months from the new financing this time. This financing is also the first financing for the Big Model Six Little Tigers this year.

The Wisdom Spectrum is the result of the transformation of the technical achievements of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory of the Computer Department of Tsinghua University. CEO Zhang Peng graduated from the Computer Department of Tsinghua University, and President Wang Shaolan is a leading innovator with a PhD from Tsinghua. Professor Tang Jie from the Computer Department of Tsinghua University also participated in the incubation.

In the second half of 2024, Zhipu successively launched the pedestal model GLM-4-Plus, the Agent model AutoGLM, GLM-Zero-Preview, etc., claiming that the performance is comparable to the corresponding models of OpenAI. The GLM pre-training architecture has achieved the full-stack independent innovation key capabilities of Zhipu from pre-training theory, technology to pre-training tools, and realized independent research and development of core modules such as underlying operators, training frameworks, etc., promoting the formation of an independent large-scale intelligent model technology innovation system.

In terms of open source, Zhipu is the first enterprise in China to open source large models. The person in charge of Zhipu told the reporter of "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" that 2025 will also be the year of open source for Zhipu. The company will soon release a brand new large model (including base models, inference models, multimodal models, Agents, etc.) and make it open source.

In terms of business, Zhipu's To B positioning is clear and leading in the industry, while also increasing its efforts to expand into the to C market. On January 23, Zhipu officially launched GLM-PC. It is based on Zhipu's multimodal large model CogAgent, an intelligent agent for public computer use.

At the same time, Zhīpǔ is betting on the next technological breakthrough, Agent, and is the first to propose the concept of Phone Use, launching AutoGLM and GLM-PC that can simulate users to perform cross-application autonomous operations on computers, phones, and other devices. Based on Agentic GLM, Zhīpǔ has cooperated with Samsung phones to bring the Agent experience to the latest Samsung phones, supporting AI-based real-time voice and video calls, as well as enabling visual understanding, system function invocation, AI search, copywriting, and other functions.

Speaking of why Smart Spectrum will re-enter the Agent field in 2024, Zhang Peng, CEO of Smart Spectrum, told the reporter of "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" earlier that, first, the main issue discussed less last year was that the model's capabilities were still insufficient and the effect was not ideal. Now, with technological progress and increasing follow-up, more and more software and hardware manufacturers are participating in adaptation. Therefore, the satisfaction of these two conditions also makes Agent more feasible.

In terms of commercialization, the person in charge of Zhipu stated that DeepSeek did not affect the commercialization process of Zhipu. It is reported that Zhipu's revenue exceeded 100 million in less than a month after the festival, and API platform paid growth exceeded 30%.

It is reported that GLM is a domestically produced large model with the lowest hallucination rate. Based on the aforementioned series of large models, Zhipu has also built service models such as MaaS, private deployment, intelligent agent platform, etc., forming a new ecosystem of model services including millions of developers: The MaaS platform supports more than 700,000 enterprises and application developers; in terms of private deployment, it serves more than 20 industries such as finance, medical care, education, and government affairs, and realizes large-scale applications in tens of thousands of enterprises and institutions.

According to the reporter of "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily", so far, Zhipu has completed at least 13 rounds of financing, with investors including Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund (Junlian Capital as the fund manager), Lightspeed China Partners, Meituan, Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Shunwei, Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and many other well-known investment institutions.

From the previous financial situation of Zhipu, currently, there is a trend for capital parties that choose to invest in large-scale projects to shift from early-stage VCs to large companies and state-owned funds. For example, the last round of investors included Zhongguancun Science City, Beishang Capital, etc.

One of the investors in this round, Hangzhou Chengtou Industrial Fund, was established on June 30, 2023, with a registered capital of 10 billion RMB. It is an industrial investment fund under Hangzhou Chengtou, aiming to promote the industrial development and urban renewal of Hangzhou through capital operation.

Hangzhou City Investment Industry Fund mainly focuses on strategic emerging industries, with most investment projects concentrated in the five key pillar industries and three leading industries in Hangzhou. Including but not limited to new energy, smart cities, high-end equipment, new materials, and other fields. In addition, the fund also promotes the integration of industry and urban development through the 'fund + base' model, helping to nurture future industries.

Another investor, Shangcheng Capital, was established in 2021 with a registered capital of 10 billion yuan. It is a large wholly state-owned company invested and supervised by the Shangcheng District Finance Bureau (District State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission) on behalf of the district government of Hangzhou.

In July 2024, the Puhua Phase II National Small and Medium Fund, established by Shangcheng Capital in cooperation with Puhua Fund, settled in Shangcheng with a total scale of 3 billion yuan, focusing on innovative small and medium-sized enterprises in the fields of high-end equipment manufacturing, new generation electronic information, new energy, new materials, medical health, etc.

Hangzhou State-owned Assets' investment in Zhipu is backed by Hangzhou's deep layout and emphasis on artificial intelligence.

Hangzhou has successively issued the "Hangzhou Artificial Intelligence Full Industry Chain High-Quality Development Action Plan (2024-2026)" and the "Hangzhou Future Industry Cultivation Action Plan (2025-2026)", outlining the development direction and goals of the artificial intelligence industry.

It is understood that Hangzhou plans to achieve a revenue breakthrough of 300 billion yuan in the artificial intelligence industry by 2025. Through policy support, industry agglomeration, and technological breakthroughs, Hangzhou is transforming from the "capital of e-commerce" to the "city of technology".

Currently, Hangzhou has emerged a group of representative companies in the field of artificial intelligence, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Virtuality, Truly Intelligent, etc.

Source: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily

Author: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily