Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open-source models are nonetheless dealing with no shortage of interest from those who don’t mind a overall performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice.
Moonshot AI, the Beijing-primarily based AI lab growing the famous Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has scale about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, as per a post by Huafeng Capital, which recommended a few investors who participated in the round.
The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Also taking part were Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng, as per the post.
The company raised $3.9-billion over the past 6-months, as per to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued $4.3-billion at the end of 2025,per report, and by early 2026, that figure had more than doubled to $10 billion following a $700 million raise.
Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 via Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher, and fast become one in of China’s most popular AI labs after its open-weight Kimi K2.5 large language model took the coding world by storm earlier this year, around topping benchmarks and posting performance figures close to that of Open AI and Anthropic’s models at the time.
The company’s present day model, Kimi K2.6, is recently the second-most used LLM on distribution platform, OpenRouter.
The fundraising comes as investor appetite for open-weight AI models made by Chinese labs surges. Moonshot’s annual habitual revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage, per the financial advisor’s post.
DeepSeek, possibly the most famous Chinese AI lab, is reportedly in talks to elevate outside capital for the primary time, at a valuation of about $45 billion.
Some of Moonshot’s rivals have even gone public on the back of demand for their AI models. Zhipu AI, which trades in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, ended Thursday with a market cap of HK$434.7 billion (more or less $55.9 billion), at the same time as MiniMax ended the day at HK$257.3 billion ($33 billion), after both stocks rallied on new model launches.
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 consist of Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (previously referred to as Sequoia China), ZhenFund, IDG Capital and 5Y Capital.
