Chinese company Moonshot AI raises $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation as demand for open source AI soars

Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much money as their Western rivals, but their open source models still face a lack of interest from those who don’t mind lower performance in exchange for cheap heuristics. And investors are taking notice.

Moonshot AIThe Beijing-based AI lab that develops the popular Kimi series of large, open-weight language models has raised about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to mail From Huafeng Capital, which advised some of the investors who participated in the round.

The round was led by Long-Z Investment, the venture capital arm of Chinese food delivery company Meituan, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng also participated, according to the post.

The company has raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, For all reportsBy early 2026, this number has more than doubled 10 billion dollars After an increase of $700 million.

Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Qilin, a former researcher at Meta AI and Google Brain, and quickly became one of the most famous AI labs in China after it was founded. Open weight Kemei K2.5 The big language model revolutionized the programming world earlier this year, nearly topping benchmarks and posting performance numbers close to those of Open AI and Anthropic models at the time.

The company’s latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second most widely used LLM on the distribution platform, OpenRouter.

The fundraising comes as investors’ appetite for open-weight AI models made by Chinese labs grows. Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue surpassed $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and application programming interface (API) usage, according to the financial advisor’s publication.

DeepSeek is perhaps the most famous Chinese AI laboratory It is said In talks to raise external capital for the first time, valued at about $45 billion.

Some of Moonshot’s competitors have even announced themselves on the back of demand for their AI models. zippo i, Which is traded in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technologyended Thursday with a market value of 434.7 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 55.9 billion US dollars), while Mini Max It ended the day at HK$257.3 billion (US$33 billion), after both stocks rose on the back of new model launches.

Moonshot’s Kimi models compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Claude’s Anthropic, as well as ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s Zhipu, and DeepSeek.

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