Moonshot AI Raises $500M in New Funding, Strengthening China’s AI Startup
In a report, Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn Moonshot AI has raised US$500 million in a recent round of Series C funding as start-up competitors MiniMax Group and Zhipu artificial intelligence equipment prepare to launch their initial public offerings (IPOs).
Developer of the extremely well-received Kimi AI models, Moonshot AI had US$150 million invested by IDG Capital to take the lead in the latest financing round, with current stakeholders Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings also playing a role, according to Chinese tech news source LatePost, on Wednesday. South China Morning Post is owned by Alibaba.
The new capital inflow is what made Moonshot AI worth US$4.3 billion, as the report says. Internal letter by founder and CEO Yang Zhilin dated Wednesday said that the company now had over 10 billion yuan (USD1.4 billion) in cash reserves, LatePost reported.
It was that financial war chest that gave a reason why Moonshot AI did not go the IPO route that other AI tigers such as MiniMax and Zhipu AI.
Yang said in the internal letter that Moonshot AI had no hurry to go out with an IPO in the short run. The company, nevertheless, did not exclaim a possible listing in the future.
The company based in Beijing refused to comment on the report.
MiniMax and Zhipu AI, the main competitors of the firm, will raise HK 4.19 billion (US338 million) and HK 4.35 billion, respectively, through going public in Hong Kong.
Recently, a US government report reported Moonshot AI as an indication of the sophistication that is increasing in the Chinese AI industry.
Besides DeepSeek, a larger and larger number of Chinese firms were currently creating world-bestowing open-weight AI models, as a post a few weeks back by the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation of the US Department of Commerce reported.
The report reviewed Moonshot AI’s flagship Kimi K2 Thinking model, which was published in November and which scored higher than OpenAI’s GPT-5 in a number of benchmarks and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in a number of benchmarks, and elicited a high rating among industry experts on social media.
Moonshot AI has also been assisted by Kimi K2 Thinking to fourfold its application programming interface revenue in the foreign market between September and November, according to an internal letter by Yang published in the LatePost report. The global paying users also increased by 170% month on month at the time.
