Moonshot AI in talks for new mega-round
Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI is in discussions to raise as much as $1 billion in fresh funding at a valuation of about $18 billion, according to Bloomberg. The talks come only months after the company raised more than $700 million in a round that valued it at roughly $10 billion.
Bloomberg also noted the speed of the company’s valuation climb: Moonshot AI was valued at about $4.3 billion following a $500 million funding round late last year, underscoring intensifying investor demand for leading AI model developers in China.
Kimi chatbot drives growth narrative
Moonshot AI is best known for building Kimi, a chatbot that has become one of China’s fastest-growing AI assistants. The company generates revenue through subscription plans and by licensing its AI technology to enterprise customers.
Investor participation in the potential new financing has not been finalized, the report said. Existing backers including Alibaba, Tencent, and 5Y Capital previously increased their stakes around the time the company reached its $10 billion valuation.
Competitive market and model-related scrutiny
The fundraising talks arrive amid a broader surge in Chinese AI valuations. Bloomberg cited peers such as Zhipu and MiniMax as having recently been valued in the $30 billion to $40 billion range, highlighting the rapidly escalating competition among domestic model builders.
Moonshot AI was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked on AI projects at Meta and Google. Separately, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic has accused Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of using outputs from its Claude model to improve their systems, a practice often described as AI distillation.
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