Chinese artificial intelligence company Zhipu AI posted worse-than-expected annual revenue growth in its first earnings report since its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong in January.

Revenue rose 131.9 per cent year on year to 724.33 million yuan (US$104.8 million) for the year ended December 2025, the Beijing-based company said on Tuesday, lagging an estimate of 756 million yuan by analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Zhipu, the first foundational AI model start-up in the world to launch an IPO, reported total losses soaring 59.5 per cent to 4.72 billion yuan in 2025, driven by mounting research and development spending, which jumped 44.9 per cent to 3.18 billion yuan.

Adjusted net losses totalled 3.18 billion yuan, a 29.1 per cent increase from the previous year.

In a post-earnings call, CEO Zhang Peng said the company was undergoing a shift from its traditional business of providing on-premises model deployment to cloud-based services.

“Many clients that initially tried to deploy our open-source models locally are gradually shifting - at least partially - toward using our cloud-based API (application programming interface),” he said.