China’s Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B valuation as demand for open source AI skyrockets

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital.

The round was led by Meituan’s venture arm. Moonshot was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher. Its open-weight Kimi K2.5 model took the coding world by storm earlier this year, posting performance figures close to OpenAI and Anthropic models.

Moonshot raised $500M at $4.3B valuation late last year, then $700M at $10B earlier this year. ARR crossed $100M in March and hit $200M in April after the K2.5 update. The open-sourced K2.6 release on April 20 enables up to 300 sub-agents to collaborate in parallel.

DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise outside capital for the first time at a valuation of about $45 billion.