Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.
Headquarters
Beijing, ChinaFounded
2023CEO / Founder
Yang ZhilinEmployees
51-200Funding
Series D+ — $4.6BProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.0/10Website
www.moonshot.ai
Profile updated
About Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.
Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. develops large language models and the Kimi AI assistant. The company was founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, schoolmates from Tsinghua University; Yang, the chief executive, co-authored the Transformer-XL and XLNet papers and previously worked at Google Brain and Meta. The company is headquartered in Beijing and is counted among China's so-called AI Tiger startups.
Moonshot launched the Kimi chatbot in October 2023, initially distinguished by long-context processing of up to 128,000 tokens. In July 2025 it released Kimi K2, an open-weight mixture-of-experts model with one trillion parameters, followed by K2 Thinking in November 2025, the multimodal K2.5 in January 2026 and K2.6, which ranked among the most-used models on the OpenRouter platform. The company also offers Kimi Code, agent tools and an API through its open platform; annualized recurring revenue passed $200 million in April 2026 on paid subscriptions and API usage.
Moonshot raised about $60 million in 2023, a $1 billion-plus Series B led by Alibaba in February 2024 at a $2.5 billion valuation, roughly $300 million with Tencent in August 2024, about $600 million in October 2025 and roughly $700 million in early 2026 at a $10 billion valuation. In May 2026 it closed a $2 billion round led by Meituan's Long-Z Investments, with China Mobile, Tsinghua Capital and CPE Yuanfeng participating, at about a $20 billion valuation, bringing disclosed funding to more than $4 billion. The company employed about 200 people as of 2024 and has been reported to be weighing a Hong Kong listing.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.
All products by Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.'s product on their own terms. They landed within 0.8 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. competes with, and how they differ.
DeepSeek pioneered the low-cost, open-weight disruption of Western frontier models with R1 in early 2025, forcing Moonshot to accelerate Kimi K2's release; both ship open-weight MoE models priced far below OpenAI/Anthropic and compete head-to-head for Chinese developer mindshare.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model family competes directly with Kimi on open-weight LLM benchmarks and enterprise API pricing in China, even though Alibaba is also Moonshot's largest single investor (~$800M in the Feb 2024 round) — a rare investor/competitor overlap.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
OpenAI's ChatGPT and API dominate the global consumer and developer distribution that Kimi is still building internationally; OpenAI keeps its frontier models closed while Moonshot open-weights Kimi K2/K3, a fundamentally different go-to-market.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Anthropic's Claude competes with Kimi at the reasoning/coding frontier; in February 2026 Anthropic accused Moonshot of improperly using Claude outputs to train Kimi K3, and U.S. officials cited the episode when restricting Anthropic model access in China, making the two active rivals with an open dispute.
3 products reviewed on TopReviewed
MiniMax's Hailuo AI targets the same Chinese consumer chat/agent and multimodal-generation market as Kimi; both are VC-fueled Beijing-area labs racing for MAU share, and MiniMax's Hong Kong-listed stock fell 16.5% the day Kimi K3 launched.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Mistral AI shares Moonshot's open-weight distribution strategy (publishing model weights rather than API-only access) but targets European enterprise and sovereign-AI customers rather than Moonshot's China-first, price-disruptive positioning.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
Opens pre-IPO "G round" targeting $50B valuation
Moonshot reportedly opened a pre-IPO funding round targeting a $50 billion valuation ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing; the round was still underway and unconfirmed by the company as of the report.
technode.com - Funding
Closes $3.5B round at $35B valuation
Moonshot closed a $3.5 billion round led by China's National AI Industry Investment Fund, roughly 3.5x its valuation since January 2026, days after the Kimi K3 launch.
finance.yahoo.com - Launch
Unveils Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model
Moonshot released Kimi K3, described as the largest open-weight AI system in the world, with a 1-million-token context window and benchmark results matching or beating Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5.
boursier.com - Funding
Raises $2B led by Meituan at $20B valuation
Moonshot raised $2 billion in a round led by Meituan's VC arm Long-Z Investments, with Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng participating, valuing the company at $20 billion.
techcrunch.com - Launch
Releases Kimi K2 Thinking
Moonshot released Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-weight reasoning update that outperformed GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 on benchmarks including Humanity's Last Exam and BrowseComp.
generation-nt.com - Launch
Open-sources Kimi K2, a 1-trillion-parameter model
Moonshot open-sourced Kimi K2, a 1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, in a bid to regain Chinese market share after DeepSeek's R1 disrupted the industry earlier in 2025.
zonebourse.com - Launch
Releases Kimi k1.5
Moonshot released Kimi k1.5, a multimodal reasoning model matching OpenAI's o1 on benchmarks, with a free web version offering real-time search and file analysis.
testingcatalog.com - Funding
Raises $300M, valuation reaches $3.3B
Moonshot secured $300 million in new funding joined by Tencent, lifting its valuation to $3.3 billion.
pandaily.com - Funding
Raises over $1B Series B at $2.5B valuation
Moonshot raised over $1 billion in a Series B led by Alibaba (~$800M) and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), with Meituan, Xiaohongshu and Monolith Management participating — reportedly the largest single funding round for a Chinese LLM developer on record at the time.
techcrunch.com - Launch
Launches Kimi chatbot in closed beta
Moonshot launched the Kimi chatbot in closed beta, initially supporting up to 200,000 Chinese characters of context — an early bet on long-context models.
en.wikipedia.org - Founded
Founded by Yang Zhilin in Beijing
Yang Zhilin (Tsinghua BS, Carnegie Mellon PhD, ex-Google/Meta) founded Moonshot AI in Beijing with Tsinghua classmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, securing $60 million in initial funding and hiring around 40 AI researchers within the first three months.
e.vnexpress.net
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