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

Chinese AI companies whitethorn not beryllium swimming successful arsenic overmuch currency arsenic their Western rivals, but their open-source models are inactive facing nary shortage of involvement from those who don’t caput a show deed successful speech for inexpensive inference. And investors are taking notice.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI laboratory processing the highly fashionable Kimi bid of open-weight ample connection models, has raised astir $2 cardinal astatine a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised immoderate investors who participated successful the round.

The circular was led by Chinese nutrient transportation institution Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Also participating were Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng, according to the post.

The institution raised $3.9 cardinal implicit the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued astatine $4.3 cardinal astatine the extremity of 2025, per reports, and by aboriginal 2026, that fig had much than doubled to $10 billion pursuing a $700 cardinal raise.

Moonshot AI was founded successful 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a erstwhile Meta AI and Google Brain researcher, and rapidly became 1 of China’s astir fashionable AI labs aft its open-weight Kimi K2.5 ample connection exemplary took the coding satellite by tempest earlier this year, astir topping benchmarks and posting show figures adjacent to that of Open AI and Anthropic’s models astatine the time.

The company’s latest model, Kimi K2.6, is presently the second-most utilized LLM connected organisation platform, OpenRouter.

The fundraising comes arsenic capitalist appetite for open-weight AI models made by Chinese labs surges. Moonshot’s yearly recurring gross topped $200 cardinal successful April, driven by accelerated maturation successful paid subscriptions and API usage, per the fiscal advisor’s post.

DeepSeek, possibly the astir fashionable Chinese AI lab, is reportedly successful talks to rise extracurricular superior for the archetypal time, astatine a valuation of astir $45 billion.

Some of Moonshot’s rivals person adjacent gone nationalist connected the backmost of request for their AI models. Zhipu AI, which trades successful Hong Kong arsenic Knowledge Atlas Technology, ended Thursday with a marketplace headdress of HK$434.7 cardinal (roughly $55.9 billion), portion MiniMax ended the time astatine HK$257.3 cardinal ($33 billion), aft some stocks rallied connected caller exemplary releases.

Moonshot’s Kimi models vie with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, arsenic good arsenic ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai, and DeepSeek.

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