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36kr has exclusively learned that recently, china's large-scale model unicorn zhipu completed a new round of financing with a pre-investment valuation of 20 billion yuan, with the amount reaching tens of billions of yuan. the lead investor in this round is zhongguancun science park company, which is a market-oriented investment platform established by the haidian district government.

the other party declined to comment on the above news.

according to public information, the new round of financing is the third completed by zhipu since 2024. at present, zhipu's shareholder lineup includes well-known investment institutions such as hillhouse capital, qiming venture partners, legend capital, and internet giants including meituan, alibaba, tencent, and xiaomi.

as the valuation threshold approaches 20 billion yuan, if the ai ​​model layer wants to continue to obtain funding, it must either have its own self-generating capabilities or establish unique business barriers in the track that can attract capital.

commercialization and rapid iteration in multimodality are the themes of zhipu in 2024.

at present, zhipu's commercialization has several main modes on the b-side: api, cloud privatization, and local privatization. according to the information disclosed by zhipu at the open day in june, its big model open platform bigmodel.cn for developers and corporate customers has more than 500,000 customers.

relevant sources revealed to 36kr that zhipu’s commercialization performance in the b-side is currently the best among unicorn companies, and its revenue is an order of magnitude ahead of the second place.

on the c-end, zhipu also tried out subscription payment on its toc product "zhipu qingyan" in 2024. according to official data, the video generation model "qingying" launched on "zhipu qingyan" also enabled "paid membership", and 1 million people used it within 2 weeks.

in terms of multimodal technology and products, in addition to the video generation model "zhipu qingying" that competes with sora, zhipu recently launched a "gpt-4o-like" video call function on zhipu qingyan.

at the same time, zhipu's "multimodal model family bucket" has also been upgraded to a plus version that can support video and web page understanding, such as the visual model glm-4v-plus that can understand videos and the text and image model cogview-3-plus that supports image editing. at the language large model level, zhipu also released an upgraded version of the base large model glm-4-plus in august.

establishing an upstream and downstream cooperative ecosystem is another aspect of today’s model enterprises’ efforts to build barriers.

overseas, openai has built a huge investment empire. according to the wall street journal, openai ceo sam altman has invested in more than 400 companies, including well-known companies such as humane and rain ai.

by expanding its investment portfolio, openai has also gained cooperative resources from upstream and downstream industries. for example, in 2019, openai purchased ai chips worth $51 million from chip company rain ai. humane, a hardware company that created the star hardware product ai pin, gets its core software capabilities from openai.

in china, zhipu ai is the first and currently the only large-model unicorn to establish an ecological fund and lay out an investment map.

since december 2022, zhipu has determined its investment strategy. in 2023, zhipu seems to be more inclined to invest in established "tsinghua-affiliated" startups, such as ai infra company qingcheng jizhi, model-layer company mianbi intelligence, and ai application company muyan zhiyu. in 2024, zhipu ai began to test the incubator model. in january, zhipu ai announced that it would launch the agi ecological fund "z fund" with ecological partners, with a total fund amount of 1 billion yuan.

it can be seen that as a model-level company, zhipu ai has reached a steep slope that requires joint support from upstream and downstream industries, whether in financing or model and business iteration.