StepFun Filed for Its Hong Kong IPO in June - It Still Has Not Listed

Where the listing actually stands

StepFun - legally Shanghai Jieyue Xingchen Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd, and 阶跃星辰 in Chinese - filed its Hong Kong listing application confidentially on or about 8 June 2026. The Wall Street Journal put the raise at up to US$500 million and the valuation at up to US$12 billion. Several Chinese outlets described it as a 秘密递表, a confidential submission, which is why no prospectus has appeared on the HKEX website for public reading.

Nothing has been announced since. There is no priced deal, no stock code, no cornerstone list and no trading debut as of 28 October 2026 - four and a half months after the filing. If you came here looking for a StepFun ticker to buy, there is not one yet.

One widely shared English headline reported the valuation as "up to $120 billion". That is a unit error: the Chinese reporting said 120亿美元, which is US$12 billion, not 120. Treat any $120 billion figure for StepFun as wrong.

The timeline, filing by filing

The valuation path is the useful part of that table: roughly US$4 billion in February, US$5-6 billion by the second tranche in April, about US$10 billion at the May round, up to US$12 billion at the June filing. That is a tripling inside five months, before a single share traded.

Does the filing lapse in December?

Under the old rule a Hong Kong listing application stayed valid for six months, so an 8 June filing would have lapsed around 8 December 2026, forcing a refiling with updated accounts. On Friday 21 August 2026 HKEX announced a temporary waiver extending that validity to 12 months, applying for three years from 21 August 2026 to August 2029.

What the reporting does not establish is eligibility. The waiver is described as covering "eligible new listing applications" without defining whether applications already in the pipeline on 21 August qualify. HKEX did say timelines under its Enhanced Application Timeframe would be adjusted based on progress reported by applicants and sponsors, which implies existing files are in scope - but that is an inference, not a published rule. So the honest position is: StepFun's deadline is either early December 2026 or around June 2027, and which one has not been publicly confirmed.

What StepFun actually sells

StepFun is not a chatbot company, which matters for how the listing gets valued. Its models ship inside more than 40 million smartphones, and it has commercial deals with Geely and Huawei - Geely aims to reach over one million vehicles using StepFun models. It positions itself as an infrastructure layer rather than a consumer destination, and it works with Biren, Cambricon and Moore Threads to tune its models for Chinese silicon, which removes a Nvidia-export dependency that several peers still carry.

The model line is multimodal from the start: Step-2, Step-1.5V and Step-1X launched at WAIC in July 2024; Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio were open-sourced in February 2025 alongside Geely; Step-R1-V-Mini followed in April 2025; Step 3 in July 2025; Step 3.5 Flash in February 2026 under Apache 2.0 as a 196B-total, 11B-active mixture-of-experts model with a 256k context window; and Step 3.7 Flash in May 2026.

Step 5 Preview changed the story before the stock did

Step 5 Preview arrived on OpenRouter on 8 October 2026. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 600 billion total and 27 billion active parameters and a 1 million token context window, priced at US$1 per million input tokens and US$2.70 per million output tokens, with cache reads between US$0.05 and US$0.10 per million depending on provider. StepFun also doubled its cached input price from CNY 0.35 to CNY 0.70 per million tokens; uncached input and output prices were unchanged.

By 15 October it ranked second on both OpenRouter's weekly and daily leaderboards, having consumed roughly 18.8 trillion tokens over seven days, with a peak day of 3.74 trillion tokens across StepFun's three listed models. It scores 44 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which puts it in the top three among open-weight models globally. Artificial Analysis measures its average cost per task at US$0.71 against US$5.86 for Claude Opus 5 - roughly an eighth. StepFun's own benchmarking claims Step 5 Preview beats Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3 on ALE-CLI, FrontierFinance and DRACO, trailing only GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.

Read the leaderboard number with the promotion in mind. The surge began the same week StepFun gave the model away free across OpenCode, Cline, NousResearch and Kilo Code, and connected it to Tencent WorkBuddy for a two-week free trial. Token volume bought with a free week is not the same as token volume bought with a credit card, and the real test is where usage settles once the promotion ends. On throughput, third-party hosts are faster than StepFun's own endpoint: inference.net serves 168 tokens per second at 0.71s median latency against StepFun's 105 tps and 3.48s.

How StepFun compares with the Chinese AI models that already trade

That last line is the one to sit with. StepFun raised more privately in May than its two listed peers raised at IPO, which means the listing is not primarily a fundraising event - it is a liquidity and index-inclusion event. It also means StepFun missed the post-listing share-price run that re-rated MiniMax and Zhipu, and comes to market against comparables trading at five to six times its own target valuation.

What to watch

Three concrete signals, in order of how much they tell you. First, a post-hearing announcement or published prospectus on the HKEX website - that is the point the deal becomes real and the financials become checkable. Second, whether StepFun refiles in early December; a refiling says the waiver did not cover it, and the updated accounts would be the first hard revenue and loss figures anyone outside the deal has seen. Third, OpenRouter token share through November, after the free week has fully washed out - a model holding top-five paid usage is a different asset to one that spiked on a giveaway.

FAQ

Is there a StepFun stock ticker?

No. StepFun filed with HKEX in June 2026 but has not priced or listed, so no stock code exists as of 28 October 2026. Any site quoting a StepFun share price is not quoting a real listing.

What valuation is StepFun seeking?

Up to US$12 billion, per Wall Street Journal reporting around the 8 June 2026 filing, on a raise of up to US$500 million. Its May 2026 private round priced it near US$10 billion.

When will StepFun list?

No date has been announced. Its February 2026 plan was to list by the end of 2026, and the filing remains valid until at least early December 2026 - or until roughly June 2027 if the HKEX waiver of 21 August covers applications already filed.

Who are StepFun's investors?

Tencent, Qiming Venture Partners, 5Y Capital, Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment, China Life Private Equity and Pudong Venture Capital, among others. Tencent has participated across multiple rounds. Total raised is reported at upwards of US$3.5 billion.

Is StepFun one of China's AI Six Tigers?

Yes. The 六小虎 grouping covers the leading Chinese large-model startups, and StepFun sits in it alongside Zhipu, MiniMax and Moonshot AI. Zhipu and MiniMax have already listed in Hong Kong; StepFun and Moonshot have not.

Can I use StepFun models now?

Yes, and you do not need to wait for the IPO. Step 5 Preview is on OpenRouter at US$1 per million input and US$2.70 per million output tokens, with open weights in BF16 and FP8 on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Step 3.5 Flash is Apache 2.0 with a 256k context window.

Sources

Bloomberg, 25 Feb 2026 · Dealroom citing TMTPost, Feb 2026 · Reuters, 13 Apr 2026 · Caixin, 8 May 2026 · The Standard, May 2026 · Asia Tech Review, 9 Jun 2026 · DigiTimes, 9 Jun 2026 · The Standard on the HKEX waiver, 21 Aug 2026 · OpenRouter model page · 36Kr, 16 Oct 2026 · AI Magazine, 15 Oct 2026