After abandoning pre-training and the AGI path, moving its core R&D team into Alibaba Cloud and pivoting to To B business a year ago, 01.AI founder and CEO Kai-Fu Lee gave an interview to LatePost, disclosing the company’s key financial performance and strategic direction for the first time. Lee revealed that 01.AI is currently dismantling its red-chip structure (a common offshore listing vehicle for Chinese firms) to prepare for an IPO, and expects to become China’s first AI 2.0 company to achieve single-quarter profitability next year. With rapid business growth, the team no longer wants to be lumped in with the "Six Little Tigers" — the six leading domestic AI model startups — and instead calls itself the "Money Leopard," a creature focused on real cash-making ability.
Financial data shows 01.AI’s audited revenue in 2025 reached 250 million RMB (with contract orders of 500 million RMB); by May 2026, locked contract orders have already exceeded 1.5 billion RMB, heading toward a 2 billion target. More importantly, nearly half of this year’s orders are recurring subscription revenue (ARR), which could earn the company a higher valuation multiple in capital markets. By dropping costly large model pre-training, 01.AI’s annual operating costs are now just over 200 million RMB, mainly in personnel, with very low GPU compute consumption.
On product positioning and market expansion, 01.AI has found product-market fit centered on "CEO-level engineering." Lee acts as the client’s "chief AI strategist," engaging directly with corporate CEOs. The company follows Palantir’s playbook, not blindly chasing foundation model iterations (internally, it uses a "use whichever works best, zero lock-in" policy for third-party models). Instead, based on ontology and multi-agent technology, it abstracts an AI transformation map for enterprises and has developed exclusive agent toolkits for executives like CEOs and CFOs — including a "Kai-Fu AI" assistant with 19 built-in agents. Currently, 01.AI holds several strategic clients with contracts worth over 100 million RMB and is conducting sovereign AI deployments in countries like Kazakhstan. To motivate the team, Lee announced an issuance of 20 million additional stock options on the company’s third anniversary, along with a CEO special incentive starting at 1 million RMB with no upper limit.