China’s AI Startup Moonshot Secures $2B Funding, Skyrocketing Valuation to $20 Billion
Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has successfully completed a $2 billion funding round, catapulting its valuation to a staggering $20 billion. This news was announced on May 7, 2026. The funding round was spearheaded by Long-Z Investments, the venture capital arm of Chinese food delivery titan Meituan. Other notable participants included China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng Capital.
Renowned for developing the widely-used Kimi chatbot and the open-source Kimi K2 series of large language models, Moonshot AI has witnessed an impressive growth trajectory. The company’s annual recurring revenue hit the $200 million mark in April 2026, a feat achieved primarily through a surge in paid subscriptions and API usage. In the last half-year alone, Moonshot has raised a whopping $3.9 billion across three funding rounds.
Moonshot was established in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former researcher at Meta AI and Google Brain. It has since evolved into one of China’s leading AI companies. The company’s latest model, Kimi K2.6, currently holds the position of the second-most used large language model on the distribution platform OpenRouter. This funding round comes at a time of increasing investor interest in open-weight AI models from Chinese labs, which offer competitive performance at lower inference costs compared to their Western counterparts.
Source: TechCrunch