Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind the Kimi chatbot, is looking for a valuation of up to $30 billion in a new funding round. That would be more than six times the $4.3 billion it was valued at in late 2025 and about 50 percent above the $20 billion from its previous round in May, the South China Morning Post reports, citing a person familiar with the matter. The Beijing-based company aims to raise between one and two billion dollars. Annual recurring revenue doubled to roughly $200 million by April.
On the technical side, Moonshot can hold its own against US providers. Its current flagship, Kimi K2.6, reportedly matches GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks. But China's AI market is crowded. Moonshot competes with DeepSeek, Alibaba, and MiniMax. As recently as April, DeepSeek released V4-Pro, the largest open-weights model to date, bigger than Kimi K2.6 and far cheaper than the competition.
Moonshot is also preparing a possible IPO in Hong Kong and is reportedly unwinding its offshore corporate structure to make that happen.
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