Catenaa, Tuesday, February 17, 2026- Chinese AI startup Moonshot is targeting a valuation of $10 billion in an expansion of a funding round already backed by Alibaba and Tencent.
The company behind the Kimi chatbot kicked off discussions in late January around additional financing to satisfy demand from investors, a Bloomberg report said, just about a month after securing $500 million in funding at a $4.3 billion valuation.
Existing backers, including Alibaba, Tencen,t and 5Y Capital, have already committed more than $700 million to the first tranche of the latest round, the report said.
The speed with which Moonshot is raising funds reflects investor eagerness for bets on a coterie of Chinese startups that are trying to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC in developing world-class AI services.
Beijing-based Moonshot last month released its Kimi K2.5, leading a wave of major Chinese AI model upgrades ahead of the crucial weeklong Lunar New Year holiday.
K2.5 is among the most-used large language models on the distribution platform OpenRouter, well ahead of rivals like DeepSeek and Alphabet’s Google Gemini.
In terms of performance, K2.5 now ranks second among open-source models on benchmarking site Artificial Analysis, eclipsed only by Chinese rival Zhipu’s newest release, GLM-5.
Talks around the financing are progressing, and it’s not certain if Moonshot can hit its target valuation, the report said.
At $10 billion, the startup would still undershoot closest rivals Zhipu and Minimax Group, both of which are valued at more than $29 billion after a pair of popular initial public offerings this year.
The duo, among the world’s first major LLM makers to go public, collectively raised more than $1 billion in Hong Kong listings.
Moonshot holds 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in cash and is in no rush for an IPO, Yang wrote in an internal memo in December.
