Beijing ModelBest Technology has registered for IPO tutoring with China’s securities regulator, making it one of the first edge large-language-model developers to test a new STAR Market listing route for AI companies without scale revenue. The filing, dated 12 August 2026, names CITIC Securities as sponsor; the company completed its joint-stock reform on 5 August, formally opening its A-share process.
The timing lands inside a STAR Market reform window. On 17 June the Shanghai exchange issued guidance letting high-quality AI model firms without meaningful revenue use the fifth listing standard, provided at least one model is live at scale. Alongside Zhipu and MiniMax, which are already Hong Kong-listed and planning STAR Market debuts, ModelBest is viewed as a front-runner under the new rule.
Founded in August 2022 and spun out of Tsinghua University’s NLP lab, ModelBest positions itself as a pioneer of edge base models. Its MiniCPM series, built for efficiency, already powers automotive human-machine interaction, smart homes, AI phones and AI PCs, with more than 43 million global downloads. The team has published over 400 papers in Nature sub-journals and top venues including ACL, ICML and NeurIPS, with research spread across Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
On the funding side, ModelBest has drawn backing from Huawei Hubble, the Beijing AI industry investment fund, China Telecom, Shenzhen Capital and the Moutai fund. Public information indicates it raised over 5 billion yuan in the first half of 2026 and now carries a valuation above 20 billion yuan, the largest edge-AI unicorn by valuation in its field.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.