Qiming-backed Chinese conversational artificial intelligence (AI) solutions provider Unisound debuted on the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange on Monday after raising a modest HK$320 million ($40.8 million) in its initial public offering (IPO).
The Beijing-based company sold over 1.56 million shares, or just 2.2% of its share capital, at a price of HK$205 ($26.1) apiece in the Hong Kong listing, commanding a market capitalisation of more than HK$14.5 billion ($1.8 billion).
Three cornerstone investors, including a wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed AI company SenseTime, subscribed a total of HK$95.5 million worth of shares, representing about a third of the IPO size.
Unisound, founded in 2012, offers conversational AI products and solutions to clients including insurance companies and more than 100 hospitals in China. Its central technology platform, UniBrain, is powered by UniGPT, a 60-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) with generative multilingual and multimodal capabilities that enable human-machine interaction through dynamic reasoning and cross-modal data processing.
“We will continue to invest in core AI infrastructure and model development, cultivate talent, and strategically expand globally to bring our advanced technologies and products to the international markets,” said Dr Huang Wei, co-founder and CEO of Unisound, in a statement.
The Hong Kong listing provided Unisound with much-needed capital to continue its R&D investment. Its total net losses in the three years from 2022-2024 crossed 1.2 billion yuan ($167.5 million), despite a strong compound annual revenue growth rate of 23% during the period. Its 2024 revenue stood at about 939 million yuan ($131.1 million), according to its prospectus.
Unisound’s successful listing in Hong Kong follows three previous attempts to go public in the past five years. Before it pivoted to a Hong Kong listing around mid-2023, the company initially targeted a mainland Chinese IPO on the Nasdaq-style STAR Market in Shanghai.
In its first attempt, the company submitted a prospectus in November 2020 for a STAR Market listing, with a fundraising target of 910 million yuan ($127 million).
Before the IPO, Unisound completed at least 10 funding rounds from investors such as Qiming Venture Partners, Trustbridge Partners, Grains Valley Venture Capital, and China Internet Investment Fund.
Its latest fundraising update was a Series D3 round of 722 million yuan ($100.8 million) in Q2 2023, when its valuation reached 8.7 billion yuan ($1.2 billion).
