Li Kaifu Reveals 01.AI Is Preparing for an IPO, Aiming for Quarterly Profit by 2027

ME AI News: According to monitoring by Beating, one year after abandoning pre-training and AGI pathways, integrating its core R&D team into Alibaba Cloud, and shifting focus to B2B services, Li Kaifu, founder and CEO of 01.AI, gave his first public interview with LatePost, revealing key financial performance and strategic direction. Li disclosed that 01.AI is currently dismantling its VIE structure in preparation for an IPO and expects to become China’s first AI 2.0 company to achieve profitability in a single quarter next year. Amid explosive business growth, the team no longer identifies with being labeled one of the “Six Little Tigers” of large models but instead proudly calls itself a “Money Leopard” focused on generating real cash flow. Financial data shows that 01.AI’s audited revenue for 2025 reached RMB 250 million (with contract orders totaling RMB 500 million); as of May 2026, its locked-in contract orders have surpassed RMB 1.5 billion, moving toward a RMB 2 billion target. Of greater commercial value, nearly half of this year’s orders consist of recurring subscription revenue (ARR), which is expected to secure higher valuation multiples in capital markets. By abandoning costly ultra-large model pre-training, 01.AI’s annual operating costs now stand at just over RMB 200 million, primarily driven by personnel expenses with minimal GPU consumption. In product positioning and market expansion, 01.AI has achieved PMF centered on its “Number One Officer Project.” Li Kaifu acts as clients’ Chief AI Strategy Officer, directly engaging with enterprise CEOs. Learning from Palantir, the company avoids blindly pursuing base model iterations (internally adopting a “use whichever works best—zero loyalty” approach to third-party models) and instead uses ontology and multi-agent technologies to map out AI transformation pathways for enterprises, developing exclusive AI agent toolkits for executives such as CEOs and CFOs—including the “Kaifu AI” assistant featuring 19 built-in agents. 01.AI now holds several strategic clients with contracts worth hundreds of millions of yuan and is deploying sovereign AI solutions in countries such as Kazakhstan. To motivate its team, Li announced a grant of 20 million new stock options on the company’s third anniversary and established a CEO incentive program starting at RMB 1 million with no upper limit. (Source: BlockBeats)