China’s Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B valuation as demand for open source AI skyrockets

Moonshot AI, founded in 2023 by former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher Yang Zhilin, has raised approximately $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to Huafeng Capital, which advised investors in the round. The round was led by Meituan's VC arm Long-Z Investment, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. The company has now raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, a rapid ascent from its $4.3 billion valuation at the end of 2025. Moonshot's open-weight Kimi series, particularly the Kimi K2.5 model, has gained prominence by nearly topping coding benchmarks and performing close to models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Its latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second most-used large language model on distribution platform OpenRouter, signaling strong developer adoption.

Moonshot's fundraising reflects surging investor appetite for Chinese open-weight AI models. The company's annual recurring revenue exceeded $200 million in April, driven by paid subscriptions and API usage growth. The competition is intensifying: rival DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise capital at a $45 billion valuation, while other Chinese AI labs like Zhipu AI (market cap ~$55.9B) and MiniMax (~$33B) have gone public. Moonshot's backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (Sequoia China), ZhenFund, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital. With Kimi models competing directly against ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and domestic rivals like Doubao and Qwen, the new capital will likely accelerate model development and enterprise API offerings.