Vast is weighing a Hong Kong listing after turning Tripo AI into one of China's better-known 3D generation tools. The company doesn't need a neat IPO story. It needs public investors to believe the 3D asset market is moving faster than the caution around Chinese AI.
Vast is now testing the public-market route that more Chinese AI companies are using when New York looks too politically expensive. Bloomberg reported that the Beijing startup behind Tripo AI is weighing a Hong Kong IPO, with Bank of America and China International Capital Corp working on the potential share sale. No filing has landed at the Hong Kong exchange yet. No size is confirmed. That's important, because this is still banker work, not a prospectus.
The company is worth watching anyway. Tripo AI turns a text prompt or a single image into a 3D model, the kind of asset game studios, animation teams and product designers usually build through slower manual work. You don't have to believe every demo video to see the business case. If a studio can get a usable mesh in seconds and clean it up from there, the cost math changes.
Vast raised $50 million in March in a round backed by Alibaba and Baidu Ventures, according to Tripo AI's own announcement on PR Newswire. Forbes later reported that founder Simon Song's company had drawn nearly 10 million individual users and 90,000 studios and companies, including NetEase and Sony. Those are company-reported figures, so read them with care. Still, they're too specific to ignore.
That's the real signal.
Song gives Vast a founder story investors can understand quickly. Forbes lists him as founder of VAST, and public company profiles identify him as a former MiniMax co-founder who also worked at SenseTime before starting the company in 2023. That background matters in China because the best-funded AI startups are no longer only fighting over chatbots. They're moving into tools that can sit inside games, design work, robotics and simulation.
Hong Kong is becoming the practical route #
Vast isn't moving in isolation. Kharon found that more than 85% of Chinese AI-related companies that went public in 2026, 23 of 27, chose Hong Kong. Fortune made the same broader point in April, noting that MiniMax, Z.ai, Biren Technology and Insilico Medicine had helped turn the city's IPO market into an AI story rather than a general rebound story.
Look, the reason isn't mysterious. U.S. scrutiny of Chinese technology companies has made American listings harder to sell, harder to clear and harder to defend. Hong Kong gives Chinese AI firms access to international capital without putting the whole deal under Washington's spotlight. That doesn't make Hong Kong risk-free. It makes it useful.
For Alibaba, the logic is plain enough. It can back Vast while the company is private, then watch Hong Kong test whether public investors will pay up for 3D generation before the category has settled. Baidu Ventures joining that same round says something too: Alibaba and Baidu compete hard across cloud, search and models, yet here both wanted exposure to the same toolmaker.
The product still has to prove itself #
The crowded field is the harder part for Vast. Tencent has Hunyuan 3D in China. Meshy competes directly on prompt-to-3D assets. Luma AI is pushing hard in visual AI, and Nvidia's Omniverse sits around the wider 3D collaboration and simulation market. You can win headlines with a funding round. You win studios by producing assets they can actually use.
Vast has one advantage that doesn't show up cleanly in IPO chatter: Tripo is already in users' hands. Forbes reported individual pricing from $20 to $140 a month, while corporate customers are charged by project. That split tells you where the business has to go. Hobbyists create noise and distribution. Studios create revenue.
The IPO question, then, isn't whether Vast can claim a place in China's AI boom. It already has one. The question is whether Hong Kong investors will treat 3D generation as core AI infrastructure or as another hot software tool whose margins get squeezed once larger platforms copy the feature.
Vast hasn't filed yet, and Bloomberg's report leaves room for the plan to change. But the direction is clear. A company founded in 2023, backed by Alibaba and Baidu Ventures, is already close enough to public markets to hire bankers. In China's AI sector right now, that tells you where the capital wants to go.
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