Deepexi unearths deep revenue growth in agentic AI wave

The company posted triple-digit growth in the first half of 2026, with revenue for the six-month period already equal to 70% of its 2025 total

Key Takeaways:

• Deepexi said it expects to report its revenue grew by 101% to 120% year-over-year in the first half of 2026
• The agentic AI company’s price-to-sales valuation is significantly lower than that for better-known peer Palantir

By Bai Xin Rui

As the global AI frenzy runs its course, people are increasingly less impressed with the simple conversational chit-chat that once wowed the world. Instead, enterprises are craving more practical AI in the form of “digital employees” who can understand and make intelligent decisions based on their business scenarios.

Deepexi Technology Co. Ltd. (1384.HK) is trying to meet that demand with its enterprise-level large language models and agentic AI applications, and, based on its latest upside financial forecast, issued earlier this month, is making strong progress in that direction. That forecast showed the company expects to report its revenue more than doubled in the first half of 2026, rising between 101% and 120% to between 266 million yuan ($39 million) and 291 million yuan.

Deepexi attributed the growth to the upgrade of its FastAGI enterprise-level AI solution to its DeepexiOS AI-level enterprise operating system platform solution. The upper limit of its expected revenue range would already equal 70% of the 415 million yuan that Deepexi recorded for all of 2025.

Origins in Huawei, Alibaba Cloud

Deepexi traces its history back to 2018 with its founding by executive directors Zhao Jiehui and Yang Lei. Both previously worked at Huawei, and Zhao subsequently went on to work at e-commerce giant Alibaba’s cloud computing unit. Deepexi launched its FastData enterprise-level data intelligence solution in 2019, with a focus on enterprise management.

Before the latest triple-digit gains, Deepexi’s revenue grew 70.8% for all of last year. Within that total, contributions from the FastData traditional data intelligence business decreased to 38.7%. As its revenue growth was accelerating, the company attracted big-name cornerstone investors to its Hong Kong listing last October, including Hillhouse, China Minsheng Bank and China Merchants Group.

The engine behind the accelerating growth is the DeepexiOS AI-level enterprise operating system, which integrates Deepexi’s enterprise large model, the FastAGI enterprise intelligent agent platform, and its FastData Foil enterprise data fusion platform. The operating system is used to construct a multi-layered matrix of AI agents, or “digital employees,” specifically tailored for different business scenarios.

The current field of enterprise AI solutions in China is still mostly at the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) + knowledge graphs phase of development. Such solutions essentially use “external retrieval plugin” models, which are highly susceptible to losing their value as the context windows of large models expand. Deepexi is trying to carve out an alternative path, targeting complex business scenarios in specific industries, such as manufacturing, which accounted for 51% of its revenue last year, and retail consumption, which made up 30%.

Take the manufacturing industry, for example, which involves massive amounts of information such as engineering drawings, scientific computations and sensor data. Deepexi deploys its core weapon, an enterprise ontology corpus database of up to 1.1 TB, to directly replace professional roles, such as AI process validation engineers and NC researchers. That provides the company with a dual moat of “industry knowledge + model capabilities,” which the company bills as its core competitive advantage.

It’s worth noting that the concept of AI agents, or intelligent agents, was included in China’s national policy documents for the first time this year. This top-level inclusion, which signals strong support from Beijing, has prompted large state-owned enterprises, industrial giants, and government agencies to significantly tilt their IT procurement budgets toward the use of intelligent agent platforms and digital employees.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), a leading high-tech regulator, has rolled out procurement policies specifically targeting AI and digital employees, offering special subsidies as high as 30% to 50% aimed at transforming the manufacturing sector. Such policies have substantially lowered procurement costs for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as larger discrete manufacturing plants, providing strong policy tailwinds for companies like Deepexi.

More cost-effective than Palantir

Deepexi’s implementation and delivery cycle requires only four to six weeks, which is faster than the higher-profile U.S.-listed Palantir’s (PLTR.US) timeframe of approximately eight to 12 weeks, according to a report from Soochow Securities. Deepexi’s accuracy rate for complex problems reaches 92%, far higher than the 78% rate for Palantir. More importantly, the average project quotation for Deepexi Technology is a relatively modest 3 million yuan, which is substantially less than Palantir rates that typically range between 5 million yuan and 8 million yuan.

Deepexi is well positioned for strong growth as demand for agentic AI takes off. Revenue from AI applications for the manufacturing industry alone is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 65% from 2025 to 2029, according to third-party data in Deepexi’s financial disclosures.

While Deepexi currently possesses a competitive advantage through its highly specialized products, it could quickly lose that high ground later if other more generalized operators like OpenAI, Anthropic or Llama can encroach on its domain. That could happen as maturing technology enables breakthrough capabilities, including long-context reasoning, coding, and long-term task planning capabilities. That could drive down costs to very low levels, flooding the market with cheap solutions directly tied to general models equipped with external RAG plugin.

That means Deepexi will need to keep spending huge amounts on R&D to maintain its technological advantage, presenting one of the biggest risks for AI companies in general.

Deepexi isn’t limiting itself to China, and is accelerating its expansion into overseas markets like the Middle East and Southeast Asia. But given that its core enterprise data, industrial process drawings, and other similar information all constitute extremely sensitive information, figuring out how to comply with China’s stringent local data security regulations could also present a significant challenge for the company in that global expansion.

Soochow Securities estimates that Deepexi’s revenue will surpass 900 million yuan this year, which could lift the company to its first-ever annual profit of around 36 million yuan. That would give the company a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 12.7 times using this year’s sales, which is still well behind Palantir’s trailing multiple of approximately 55 times. That could help Deepexi’s stock, which initially soared after its IPO but has more recently given back most of the initial gains, to regain some of its lost momentum.

To subscribe to Bamboo Works weekly free newsletter, click here