Key Takeaways
- Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI lab developing popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion.
- The round was led by Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment. Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng also participated in the fundraising.
- Moonshot AI’s latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second-most used LLM on distribution platform OpenRouter.
- The company’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage.
Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western counterparts, but their open-source models are still attracting significant interest from those who prioritize performance over cost. Investors have taken notice of this trend, with Moonshot’s fundraising coming at a time when demand for open-weight AI models made by Chinese labs is surging.
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DeepSeek, one of China’s most popular AI labs, is reportedly in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, with a valuation of about $45 billion. Some of Moonshot’s rivals have already gone public on the back of their model demand, including Zhipu AI (Knowledge Atlas Technology) and MiniMax.
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Moonshot’s Kimi models compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai, and DeepSeek. The company’s backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital.
Originally published at techcrunch.com. Curated by AI Maestro.
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