A two-year-old AI startup just reminded Wall Street that the AI arms race is very much a two-horse affair. Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based company behind the Kimi chatbot, is preparing for a Hong Kong IPO after the release of its latest model triggered selloffs in US semiconductor stocks.
The company is targeting a valuation of up to $30 billion and looking to raise over $2 billion. That’s a 50% jump from the roughly $20 billion valuation it carried in previous private funding rounds.
The model that moved markets
On July 17, Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The model boasts 2.8 trillion parameters, making it what the company calls the world’s largest open-weight AI system.
Open-weight means other developers can access and build on top of the model’s architecture, which is the opposite of the locked-down approach favored by OpenAI and Anthropic. Kimi K3 reportedly matches or rivals leading US models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT on coding benchmarks at a lower operational cost.
