Moonshot AI is pursuing a new financing round targeting as much as $2 billion, which would lift its valuation to $30 billion. This marks the company’s third fundraising exercise within six months, designed to keep pace with rivals amid China’s intensifying artificial intelligence competition.
Sources familiar with the matter stated that Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi chatbot, has held preliminary talks with prospective investors to secure more than $1 billion in fresh capital. Discussions kicked off shortly before the close of its prior funding round led by Meituan, which valued the startup at $20 billion upon completion. Should Moonshot AI hit its latest fundraising target, its valuation would surge sevenfold from December last year, when the firm was valued at just over $4 billion.
Moonshot AI has rapidly emerged as one of China’s best-capitalized AI research labs, as investors channel massive funding into elite domestic players competing against global counterparts such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. The latest capital raise would push Moonshot AI past its listed peer Minimax, which holds a market valuation of approximately $20 billion. Even so, both firms remain behind Zhipu AI, valued at around $80 billion, and DeepSeek, which secured a roughly $50 billion valuation in its maiden financing round.
Fueled by skyrocketing demand for its chatbot and large language models, Moonshot AI’s annual recurring revenue — a metric tracking predictable future sales — surpassed $200 million in April.
Founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor with prior stints at Meta and Google under Alphabet, Moonshot AI operates tiered subscription plans for its consumer chatbot and licenses its underlying core technologies to enterprise clients. Most recently, the company launched Kimi Work, a general-purpose AI agent built on its cutting-edge K2.6 model series.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）