Chinese AI companies may not be making as much money as their Western rivals, but their open-source models still aren’t attracting interest from those who don’t mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap results. And investors are taking notice.
Moonshot AIthe Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab that develops the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models has raised $2 billion in a $20 billion valuation. post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some of the investors involved in the round.
The round was led by Long-Z Investment, the VC arm of Chinese food delivery company Meituan, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. According to the post, Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng also participated.
The company has raised $3.9 billion in the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot is valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025. according to reportsand at the beginning of 2026, this number has more than doubled 10 billion dollars After a $700 million increase.
Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher, and has quickly become one of the most popular AI labs in China. open weight Kimi K2.5 the big language model took the coding world by storm earlier this year, almost surpassing benchmarks and posting performance benchmarks close to those of Open AI and Anthropic at the time.
The company’s latest model, the Kimi K2.6, is currently the second most used LLM on the distribution platform. OpenRouter.
The fundraising comes as investor appetite for open-weight AI models developed by Chinese labs grows. Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage, according to the financial advisor’s note.
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DeepSeek is perhaps the most famous Chinese AI lab reported for the first time, it is negotiating to attract foreign capital worth about 45 billion dollars.
Some of Moonshot’s competitors have even gone public amid demand for AI models. Zhipu AI, Trading as Knowledge Atlas Technology in Hong Kongended Thursday with a market capitalization of HK$434.7 billion (about $55.9 billion). MiniMax Both stocks ended the day at HK$257.3 billion ($33 billion) after gains on new model releases.
Moonshot’s Kimi models compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, as well as ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai and DeepSeek.
Moonshot’s backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund, IDG Capital and 5Y Capital.
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