(March 14): Moonshot AI is seeking to raise as much as US$1 billion ($1.28 billion) in an expanded funding round that would value the start-up at about US$18 billion, more than quadrupling its valuation in just three months and underscoring growing interest in Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) developers racing to rival Silicon Valley leaders.
The company behind the Kimi chatbot kicked off discussions for the latest round, people familiar with the matter said, after securing more than US$700 million earlier this year that valued it at US$10 billion. That marks a significant jump from its US$4.3 billion valuation in a US$500 million tranche towards the end of last year, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information.
It’s unclear who is participating in the latest round, but Moonshot backers including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd and 5Y Capital increased their bets at the US$10 billion level, Bloomberg News reported last month.
A Moonshot spokesperson didn’t respond to requests seeking comments.
The speed of Moonshot’s fundraising reflects growing investor appetite for a group of Chinese start-ups vying with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC to develop world-class AI services. In Hong Kong, rivals Zhipu and MiniMax Group Inc have recently traded at valuations between US$30 billion and US$40 billion, with MiniMax at one point surpassing Chinese internet incumbent Baidu Inc in market capitalisation.
Part of the frenzy was ignited by the breakout hit of open-source agent OpenClaw, prompting China’s top cloud providers and AI upstarts to launch their own versions for seamless adoption.
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Moonshot was first among those to capitalise on the trend with the rollout of Kimi Claw, powered by its latest Kimi K2.5 model. After the launch, Moonshot’s monthly sales exceeded its total revenue for the whole of last year, according to one of the people.
Moonshot was founded by former Tsinghua University professor Yang Zhilin, 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 clients, though it trails Zhipu and MiniMax in commercialisation.
As Chinese model makers expand globally, they have attracted increasing scrutiny. Anthropic last month accused Moonshot and rivals DeepSeek and MiniMax of illicitly extracting results from its Claude model to bolster the capabilities of their own products — a practice known as distillation.
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