Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI is a AI Model Development startup based in Beijing, China that has raised $3.9B in venture capital across 5 funding rounds since 2023. The company reached Series D stage in 2023 with a $60M round led by institutional investors at a $300M valuation. Moonshot AI's investor base includes 10 institutional funds, with Alibaba leading the most recent equity round.

Moonshot AI (月之暗面) is a Beijing-based AI startup founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin — all Tsinghua University alumni. The company develops large language models with a focus on long-context understanding, capable of processing extremely long documents and conversations. Its flagship product, Kimi, is one of China's most widely used AI assistants, offering up to 200,000 Chinese character context windows and powering both consumer and enterprise applications. Kimi has grown rapidly into one of China's leading AI chatbots, achieving over $200 million in annualized recurring revenue as of April 2026 — doubling from the prior month. The company's K2 model family has demonstrated competitive performance globally, with its K2.6 model ranked second worldwide on OpenRouter by weekly call volume at 1.85 trillion tokens. Moonshot AI competes directly with OpenAI, Zhipu AI, Baidu's ERNIE, and other domestic Chinese frontier model providers. Since its founding, Moonshot AI has raised over $3.8 billion across multiple rounds, becoming China's best-funded large language model startup with a valuation of approximately $20 billion as of May 2026. The company is reportedly pursuing a Hong Kong IPO under rules implemented by Beijing to support domestic AI champions. Backers include Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, and IDG Capital.

Lead investors

Co-investors

• startup_fundraisingMoonshot AI's $20 Billion Valuation Marks Rapid AI Funding Trajectory in China