Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but open-source models still face a lack of interest from those who don’t mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inferences. And investors are paying attention.
Moonshot AIthe Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab that develops the popular Kimi series of open-weight language models has raised about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to position by Huafeng Capital, which informed some investors that participated in the round.
The round was led by the VC arm of Chinese food delivery company Meituan, Long-Z Investments, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng also participated, according to the post.
The company raised $3.9 billion in the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, per referencesand by early 2026, that number had more than doubled to 10 billion dollars after raising $700 million.
Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former researcher at Meta AI and Google Brain, and quickly became one of China’s most popular AI labs after its open-weight Kimi K2.5 language model took the coding world by storm earlier this year, nearly surpassing benchmarks and publishing AI performance figures close to that 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 grows for open-weight AI models made by Chinese labs. 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 position.
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DeepSeek, perhaps China’s most popular artificial intelligence lab, is reportedly in talks to raise capital from abroad for the first time, at a valuation of around $45 billion.
Some of Moonshot’s rivals have even gone public due to the demand for their AI models. Zhipu AI, which trades in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technologyclosed Thursday with a market capitalization of HK$434.7 billion (about $55.9 billion), while MiniMax closed the day at HK$257.3 billion ($33 billion) as both stocks rose 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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