Chinese AI firms may not have as much funding as their Western counterparts, yet their open-source models garner considerable attention, even if this means reduced performance for more affordable inference. Investors are taking notice.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known for its Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has secured about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, as per a report by Huafeng Capital, which advised some investors involved.
The funding round was led by Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment, with participations from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. Over the past six months, Moonshot raised $3.9 billion, as stated by Huafeng Capital. Valued at $4.3 billion at end of 2025, this figure more than doubled by early 2026 after a $700 million raise.
Founded in 2023 by former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot rose to fame in China with its Kimi K2.5 model, which approached benchmarks and nearly matched the performance of OpenAI and Anthropic models. Their latest, Kimi K2.6, ranks as the second-most used LLM on OpenRouter.
Investor interest in Chinese open-weight AI models is climbing. Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue surpassed $200 million in April, fueled by growth in subscriptions and API usage.
DeepSeek, another prominent Chinese AI lab, is reportedly eyeing outside investments for the first time at a $45 billion valuation.
Several of Moonshot’s competitors have gone public, capitalizing on AI model demand. Zhipu AI, listed in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, has a market cap of HK$434.7 billion ($55.9 billion), and MiniMax has HK$257.3 billion ($33 billion), after model release-driven rallies.
Moonshot’s Kimi models compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai, and DeepSeek.
Moonshot’s investors include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, ZhenFund, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital.