Kai-Fu Lee's 01.ai eyes Hong Kong IPO in 2027

Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI is targeting a Hong Kong listing in 2027, after its fiscal year-end, as the Beijing-based startup works to unwind the offshore holding structure it would need to dismantle before listing overseas. Lee, the former Google China president who founded 01.AI in 2023, said the company plans to raise pre-IPO capital and conclude that financing around the time it reports its first full annual results.

01.AI reached unicorn status within a year of its founding, hitting a valuation above $1 billion after a funding round that included Alibaba's cloud unit. Since then the company has pivoted sharply: in March 2025 it stopped pretraining new large language models from scratch, one of China's costliest and most competitive races, and shifted toward selling customized enterprise and government AI deployments, an approach Lee now frames as closer to Palantir's data-and-decisioning platform than to foundation-model rivals like OpenAI or Anthropic.

That government-to-business strategy appears to be gaining traction: 01.AI's order volume reportedly rose from roughly RMB 500 million in 2025 to a 2026 contract tally near RMB 1.5 billion, a threefold jump that is likely to feature in the case Lee makes to pre-IPO investors and, eventually, to Hong Kong exchange officials.

Details of the pre-IPO round, including size and investor names, have not been disclosed, and 01.AI is one of several Chinese 'AI Six Tigers' startups racing toward public listings as Beijing pushes homegrown AI champions toward capital markets. Investors could watch whether 01.AI converts its enterprise and government contract pipeline into disclosed, audited revenue ahead of the 2027 listing, and how Hong Kong's IPO market absorbs a wave of Chinese AI offerings that may also include peers such as Moonshot AI in a similar window.

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