Moonshot AI seeks to raise up to $1 billion in an expanded financing round that would value the startup at about $18 billion, which would more than quadruple its valuation in just three months and would highlight the growing interest of Chinese AI developers in competing with Silicon Valley leaders.
According to sources close to the matter, the company behind the Kimi chatbot has begun talks for its latest round of financing, having raised more than $700 million earlier this year, valuing it at $10 billion. This represents a significant jump from its valuation of US$4.3 billion in a US$500 million round at the end of last year, according to the same sources, who asked to remain anonymous because the information is confidential.
It’s unclear who is involved in the latest funding round, but Moonshot investors, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and 5Y Capital all raised their bets to $10 billion, Bloomberg News reported last month.
A spokesperson for the Moonshot project did not respond to requests for comment.
The speed with which Moonshot has raised funding reflects growing investor interest in a group of Chinese startups competing with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC to develop world-class AI services. In Hong Kong, rivals Zhipu and MiniMax Group Inc. have recently traded at valuations of between $30 billion and $40 billion, with MiniMax surpassing Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. in market capitalization.
Part of this frenzy was sparked by the runaway success of the open source OpenClaw agent, galvanizing major cloud service providers. and Chinese AI startups to release their own versions for smooth adoption.
Moonshot was one of the first companies to take advantage of this trend with the launch of the Kimi Claw, powered by its latest model, the Kimi K2.5. Following the launch, Moonshot’s monthly sales exceeded its total revenue from last year, according to a source.
Moonshot was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former professor at Tsinghua University, who previously worked on AI projects at Meta Platforms Inc. and Google. The company sells tiered subscription plans for its chatbot and offers its underlying technology to enterprise customers, although its marketing lags behind that of Zhipu and MiniMax.
As Chinese model makers expand globally, they have attracted increasing scrutiny. Last month, Anthropic accused Moonshot and rivals DeepSeek and MiniMax of illicitly extracting results from its Claude model to improve the capabilities of their own products, a practice known as distillation.
