Raise a lobster to China’s ‘AI Tigers’ – a year on from DeepSeek new companies are gaining attention as OpenClaw takes off

Over a year on from DeepSeek, China’s progress on AI has been unrelenting and several new companies are gaining attention from investors.

Meet China’s AI ‘tigers’, a class of AI unicorns that are set to be at the forefront of the next wave the AI arms race as China takes on the US.

Two firms in particular have shot to prominence after IPOs this year – MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas Technologies - off the back of China’s rising prominence in AI and the launch of OpenClaw, a new AI tool that’s gone viral in China.

Shares in the companies soared on Wednesday following upbeat comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on OpenClaw, which is an open-source AI agent popular in China. MiniMax had already seen its shares pop as much as 50% last week because of the popularity of OpenClaw.

Huang said OpenClaw was “definitely the next ChatGPT”. Companies across the AI space have been beefing up their agentic AI offerings and recently rolled out tools built on OpenClaw.

“It is now the largest, most popular, the most successful open-sourced project in the history of humanity,” Jensen told CNBC on the sidelines of Nvidia’s GTC event in California. “This is definitely the next ChatGPT.”

OpenClaw is a free, open-source platform that can be used create assistants to perform a multitude of digital and online tasks – such as monitoring markets, or sending emails. OpenClaw has become so popular that ‘raising a lobster’ - a reference to the shellfish logo – has become a meme in China.

“OpenClaw opened the next frontier of AI to everyone and became the fastest-growing open source project in history,” said Huang said in a statement this week to announce the launch of NemoClaw, Nvidia's stack for the OpenClaw agent platform. “Mac and Windows are the operating systems for the personal computer. OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI.”

Meet the AI Tigers

Knowledge Atlas Technology – better known as Zhipu – was the first of China’s so-called AI tigers to go public with an IPO earlier this year, the first successful large language model (LLM) company listing in China.

The company, which was founded in 2019 by researchers from Tsinghua University, caught the attention of OpenAI last year. In a blog post in Juen, OpenAI said Zhipu AI had made “notable progress” in the global AI race.

Zhipu recently unveiled GLM-5, an open-source LLM, which it says is close to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 on coding benchmarks and beats Google’s Gemini 3 Pro in some tests. Earlier this week shares jumped on the release of GLM-5-Turbo, a foundation model optimised for OpenClaw.

While DeepSeek has gathered a lot of attention, OpenAI has called out Zhipu for its global expansion and ties to Beijing.

In the blog post, the US firm said: “Zhipu Al maintains strong links with China's government and state-owned entities, as evidenced by over $1.4 billion in state-backed investment, numerous government procurement contracts, and active involvement in setting national AI technical standards.”

It suggests that Zhipu is deeply embedded with China’s Belt and Road initiative and “to lock Chinese systems and standards into emerging markets before US or European rivals can, while showcasing a ‘responsible, transparent and audit-ready' Chinese AI alternative”.

The company was placed on the US Commerce Department’s Entity List in January last year, with officials warning Zhipu was working with China’s military.

MiniMax – the second of China’s so-called AI tigers to go public- saw its shares double in value on the first day of trading in Hong Kong in January after raising HK$4.8 billion (c$620 million at the time). It was founded in 2022 by the former SenseTime executive Yan Junjie. In its first annual results since listing released in February the company reported a surge in revenues though losses widened. Revenue climbed to $79 million in 2025 from $30.5 million the previous year, driven by growth in its AI-native apps, which include a video-generation product and an AI companion app.

Other so-called AI tigers which could be looking to IPO soon include start-up Moonshot, which is planning to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round that would value the firm at around $18 billion.

Another is StepFun, which is reportedly looking at an IPO in Hong Kong raising about $500 million.

Others include Baichuan Intelligence and 01.AI, which was founded by Chinese AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee.

Many of the AI tigers are backed by incumbent AI leaders in China including Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. They too are racing to tap into the OpenClaw phenomenon. Tencent, which reported a 13% rise in Q4 revenues on Wednesday, recently it launched its "OpenClaw" AI ‌product ⁠suite, including QClaw for individual users, Lighthouse for developers and WorkBuddy for enterprises. Last week Alibaba released its dedicated mobile app to help users install and deploy OpenClaw more easily. “JVS Claw” helps iOS and Android smartphone users to easily instruct Ai agents to carry out simple tasks.