Moonshot AI Seeks USD 1 Billion, USD 18 Billion Valuation
Moonshot AI seeks to raise as much as USD 1 billion in an expanded funding round. This would value the Chinese start-up at approximately USD 18 billion, more than quadrupling its valuation in three months. The move highlights growing interest in Chinese artificial intelligence developers.
The organisation behind the Kimi chatbot initiated discussions for the current funding round. This follows a previous raise of more than USD 700 million, which valued Moonshot AI at USD 10 billion.
That USD 10 billion valuation marked a significant increase from its USD 4.3 billion valuation in a USD 500 million tranche of funding received towards the end of last year.
It is currently unclear who is participating in the latest funding round. Previous backers, including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, and 5Y Capital, increased their investments when the valuation reached USD 10 billion, as Bloomberg News reported last month.
Moonshot AI's rapid fundraising reflects increasing investor interest in Chinese start-ups. These organisations compete with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to develop world-class artificial intelligence services.
In Hong Kong, rival organisations Zhipu and MiniMax Group have recently achieved valuations between USD 30 billion and USD 40 billion. MiniMax, at one point, surpassed Chinese internet incumbent Baidu in market capitalisation.
The success of the open-source agent OpenClaw contributed to this intense activity. This prompted China’s leading cloud providers and artificial intelligence upstarts to launch their own versions for easy adoption.
Moonshot AI was among the first to leverage this trend with the introduction of Kimi Claw. Kimi Claw is powered by its latest Kimi K2.5 model. Following its launch, Moonshot AI’s monthly sales surpassed its total revenue from the previous year, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
Former Tsinghua University professor Yang Zhilin founded Moonshot AI. Yang previously worked on artificial intelligence projects at Meta Platforms and Google.
The organisation offers tiered subscription plans for its chatbot. It also provides its core technology to enterprise clients, though it currently lags behind Zhipu and MiniMax in commercialisation efforts.
As Chinese model developers expand globally, they have drawn increased scrutiny. Anthropic recently accused Moonshot AI and competitors DeepSeek and MiniMax of illicitly extracting results from its Claude model. This practice, known as distillation, aims to enhance the capabilities of their own products.
Moonshot AI is seeking USD 1 billion in new funding.
This funding round would value the artificial intelligence start-up at USD 18 billion.
The organisation's valuation has more than quadrupled in three months.
Source: SCMP
