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

Source: TechCrunch

Funding round

Moonshot AI, the Beijing‑based AI lab behind the popular Kimi series of open‑weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some of the investors in the round.

The round was led by Meituan’s venture‑capital arm Long‑Z Investment, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng.

Moonshot raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. The company was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025 (per Bloomberg) and, by early 2026, that figure had more than doubled to $10 billion following a $700 million raise.

Company background

Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher. Its open‑weight model Kimi K2.5 quickly gained traction in the coding community, achieving benchmark results close to those of OpenAI and Anthropic at the time.

The latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second‑most used LLM on the distribution platform OpenRouter (weekly rankings).

Market context

Investor appetite for open‑weight AI models from Chinese labs is surging. Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage.

Other Chinese AI labs are also attracting significant attention:

• DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, at a valuation of about $45 billion.
• Zhipu AI (trading in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology) closed Thursday with a market cap of HK$434.7 billion (≈ $55.9 billion).
• MiniMax ended the day at HK$257.3 billion (≈ $33 billion), after both stocks rallied on new model releases.

Competitors

Moonshot’s Kimi models compete with:

• OpenAI – ChatGPT
• Google – Gemini
• Anthropic – Claude
• ByteDance – Doubao
• Alibaba – Qwen
• Zhipu – Z.ai
• DeepSeek – its own suite of models

Investors and backers

Moonshot’s backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), ZhenFund, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital.