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Li Kaifu Reveals Zero One Technology is Preparing for IPO, Aiming for Quarterly Profit Next Year, Rejects 'Six Little Tigers' Label to Become 'Money Leopard'

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, one year after abandoning the pre-training and AGI route, integrating its core R&D team into Alibaba Cloud, and shifting to B2B business, Zero One Technology's founder and CEO Li Kaifu disclosed the company's key financial performance and strategic direction in an interview with LatePost. Li revealed that Zero One Technology is currently dismantling its red-chip structure in preparation for an IPO and expects to become the first AI 2.0 company in China to achieve quarterly profitability next year. Due to rapid business growth, the internal team is no longer satisfied with being categorized as one of the 'Six Little Tigers' of large models, instead branding itself as a 'Money Leopard' focused on generating real revenue. Financial data shows that Zero One Technology's audited revenue for 2025 is projected to reach 250 million RMB (with contract orders of 500 million RMB); as of May 2026, its total locked contract orders have exceeded 1.5 billion RMB, aiming for a target of 2 billion RMB. Notably, nearly half of this year's orders are recurring subscription revenue (ARR), which is expected to secure a higher valuation multiple in the capital market for the company. By abandoning the costly ultra-large model pre-training, Zero One Technology's annual operating costs are currently just over 200 million RMB, primarily focused on personnel expenses, with very low GPU computing consumption. In terms of product positioning and market expansion, Zero One Technology has found its product-market fit (PMF) centered around the 'No. 1 Position Project.' Li Kaifu acts as the 'Chief AI Strategy Officer' for clients, directly interfacing with the top executives of enterprises. The company learns from Palantir, not blindly pursuing iterations of foundational models (internally adhering to the principle of 'use whoever is effective, with zero stickiness' for third-party large models), but instead, based on ontology and multi-agent technology, abstracting an AI transformation roadmap for enterprises and developing exclusive agent toolkits for executives like CEOs and CFOs (such as the 'Kaifu AI' assistant with 19 built-in agents). Currently, Zero One Technology has secured several strategic clients worth over 100 million RMB and is deploying sovereign AI in countries like Kazakhstan. To incentivize the team, Li Kaifu announced the issuance of 20 million stock options on the company's third anniversary and established a CEO incentive program starting at 1 million RMB with no upper limit.

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