Kai-Fu Lee's 01.ai Targets Hong Kong IPO in 2027, Plans Pre-IPO Funding Round

According to Bloomberg, Kai-Fu Lee's 01.ai announced at the World AI Conference in Shanghai that it is targeting a Hong Kong initial public offering in 2027 and plans to seek pre-IPO funding around the time it reports annual results for the first time. The Beijing-based AI startup, valued at over $1 billion within eight months of its 2023 launch, is unwinding its offshore holding structure ahead of the listing.

01.ai has shifted from building frontier large language models to enterprise AI infrastructure, fine-tuning open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and Z.AI's GLM. Lee said approximately half of the company's business now comes from outside China.