Moonshot AI secures $2B funding at $20B valuation amid open-source AI boom

Chinese AI companies may not have access to the same level of funding as many of their Western rivals. Still, interest in their open-source AI models continues to grow among users willing to trade a slight performance drop for lower inference costs. Investors are increasingly paying attention to that momentum.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab behind the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised around $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to a post from Huafeng Capital, which advised several investors in the round.

The funding round was led by Long-Z Investments, the venture capital arm of Chinese food delivery giant Meituan, a company spokesperson said. Other participants included Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng, according to the post from Huafeng Capital.

Huafeng Capital said Moonshot AI has raised a total of $3.9 billion over the last six months. Reports previously valued the company at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, while a $700 million raise earlier in 2026 reportedly pushed its valuation above $10 billion before this latest funding round doubled it again.

Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former researcher at Meta AI and Google Brain. The startup quickly emerged as one of China’s most closely watched AI labs after the release of its open-weight Kimi K2.5 large language model, which gained significant attention in the coding community earlier this year for posting benchmark results close to those of OpenAI and Anthropic models at the time.

The company’s latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently ranked the second-most-used large language model on the AI distribution platform OpenRouter.

The fundraising highlights growing investor enthusiasm around open-weight AI models developed by Chinese AI labs. According to Huafeng Capital, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue surpassed $200 million in April, driven by strong growth in paid subscriptions and API usage.

Moonshot AI is not the only Chinese AI company attracting investor attention. DeepSeek, one of the country’s most prominent AI labs, is reportedly in discussions to raise outside funding for the first time at a valuation of roughly $45 billion.

Some of Moonshot’s competitors have already gone public amid strong investor demand for AI companies. Zhipu AI, which trades in, closed Thursday with a market capitalisation of HK$434.7 billion, or about $55.9 billion. MiniMax also saw strong market performance, ending the day with a market cap of HK$257.3 billion (approximately $33 billion), after both companies benefited from rallies tied to new model releases.

Moonshot’s Kimi models compete against global AI products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, while also facing competition from Chinese rivals, including ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai, and DeepSeek. The company’s existing backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan — previously known as Sequoia China — along with ZhenFund, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital.