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.