Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI (Chinese: 月之暗面, literally "the dark side of the moon") is a Chinese artificial intelligence company headquartered in Beijing, founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin and co-founders from leading Chinese and international AI research institutions. The company is best known for developing the Kimi family of large language models, which emphasised long-context processing from its inception, and is regarded as one of China's most valuable AI startups.^[1][2]

History and Funding

Moonshot AI was established in March 2023 and was valued at US$300 million after an early round of about US$60 million.^[1] In February 2024, Alibaba Group led a US$1 billion funding round that valued the company at US$2.5 billion, with Alibaba acquiring a 36 percent stake — at the time one of the largest single funding rounds for a Chinese AI startup.^[1] In August 2024, Tencent and Gaorong Capital joined a US$300 million round that raised the valuation to US$3.3 billion.^[1]

In October 2025, Moonshot was reported to be nearing completion of a round of approximately US$600 million led by IDG Capital, valuing the company at US$3.8 billion pre-money.^[1] In May 2026, the company raised about US$2 billion at a US$20 billion valuation in a round led by Long-Z Investments, the venture arm of food delivery firm Meituan, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng.^[3] Moonshot raised US$3.9 billion in the six months prior to that round, and by June 2026 it was reported to be seeking up to US$2 billion more at a US$30 billion valuation.^[3][4] Its annual recurring revenue topped US$200 million in April 2026, roughly doubling from US$100 million at the start of March 2026.^[4] In March 2026, Moonshot was reported to be considering an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.^[1]

In February 2026, Anthropic publicly accused Moonshot of violating its terms of service by using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude for use in training Moonshot's own models.^[1]

Kimi Models

Moonshot's flagship product is the Kimi conversational assistant, which gained attention for industry-leading context window lengths and strong performance on long-document and agentic reasoning tasks.^[2] Kimi K2, released in July 2025, was a one-trillion-parameter open-weight model, followed by Kimi K2 Thinking in November 2025, which was lauded as the top-performing open-source system on several benchmarks.^[1][4] Kimi K2.5, released in January 2026, added native vision capabilities through a 400-million-parameter vision encoder called MoonViT, enabling the model to process images and video for agentic tasks.^[1] The K2.6 series ranked as the second most-used large language model on the OpenRouter platform, and the company also launched Kimi Work, a general-purpose AI agent.^[4] In July 2026, Moonshot released Kimi K3, described as the world's largest open AI model.^[1]

Impact

Moonshot's combination of open-weight releases, long-context capability, and reported capital-efficient training has made Kimi models a widely used low-cost option in the global open-model ecosystem, distributed through platforms such as OpenRouter.^[4] The company sells tiered subscriptions for the Kimi chatbot as well as enterprise access to its underlying technology.^[4]

>See Also

• Kimi
• DeepSeek
• Qwen
• Zhipu AI
• Open Weights

References