- Moonshot's latest two funding rounds collectively exceeded $1.2 billion, setting a new single-round financing record in China's AI large-model space over the past year.
- This valuation doubles the $4.3 billion valuation from the previous round. Meanwhile, a new financing round targeting a valuation of $10 to $12 billion has commenced.
Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is nearing the closing of a new funding round exceeding $700 million, just over a month after its previous $500 million round, signaling sustained market enthusiasm for China's large-model sector.
The latest funding was jointly led by existing investors including Alibaba, Tencent and 5Y Capital, pushing Moonshot AI's valuation past $10 billion, according to a Tuesday report by China Star Market.
The valuation doubles the $4.3 billion valuation from its previous round. Meanwhile, a new funding round targeting a valuation between $10 billion and $12 billion has already commenced, the report said.
Moonshot's combined funding from the two latest rounds exceeds $1.2 billion, setting a record for a single funding round in China's AI large-model industry over the past year.
The rapid pace of Moonshot's funding reflects investor enthusiasm for Chinese AI unicorns. Late last year, founder Yang Zhilin disclosed in an internal letter that the company held cash reserves exceeding RMB 10 billion ($1.45 billion), stating there was no urgency to go public.
He also noted that from September to November 2025, the monthly growth rate of paid users both domestically and internationally exceeded 170%, while overseas API revenue surged fourfold.
On the product front, Moonshot's Kimi chatbot recently launched its K2.5 model, which leads competitors like DeepSeek and Google Gemini in usage on the OpenRouter platform and ranks second on the Artificial Analysis open-source model leaderboard.
However, Moonshot still lags behind competitors in commercialization.
Zhipu AI and MiniMax have already listed in Hong Kong, with latest market caps of HK$226.5 billion ($29 billion) and HK$265.6 billion respectively.
In an internal memo last December, Yang set the goal to surpass frontier companies like Anthropic and become the world's leading AGI company.
To achieve this, the company will primarily allocate its new funding round to expanding computing power, accelerating training and R&D for the next-generation K3 model, while significantly enhancing employee incentives.
($1 = RMB 6.9087, $1 = HK$ 7.8151)
