Catenaa, Saturday, March 14, 2026- Moonshot AI is seeking to raise as much as $1 billion in an expanded funding round that would value the startup at about $18 billion.
The company behind the Kimi chatbot kicked off discussions for the latest round after securing more than $700 million earlier this year, which valued it at $10 billion, Bloomberg News reported.
That marks a significant jump from its $4.3 billion valuation in a $500 million tranche toward the end of last year, the report said.
It’s unclear who is participating in the latest round, but Moonshot backers, including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, and 5Y Capital, increased their bets at the $10 billion level, Bloomberg News reported last month.
The speed of Moonshot’s fundraising reflects growing investor appetite for a group of Chinese startups vying with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC to develop world-class AI services.
In Hong Kong, rivals Zhipu and MiniMax Group have recently traded at valuations between $30 billion and $40 billion, with MiniMax at one point surpassing Chinese internet incumbent Baidu in market capitalization.
Part of the frenzy was ignited by the breakout hit of open-source agent OpenClaw, prompting China’s top cloud providers and AI upstarts to launch their own versions for seamless adoption.
Moonshot was first among those to capitalize on the trend with the rollout of Kimi Claw, powered by its latest Kimi K2.5 model. After the launch, Moonshot’s monthly sales exceeded its total revenue for the whole of last year, the report said.
Moonshot was founded by former Tsinghua University professor Yang Zhilin, who previously worked on AI projects at Meta Platforms Inc. and Google. The company sells tiered subscription plans for its chatbot and offers its underlying technology to enterprise clients, though it trails Zhipu and MiniMax in commercialization.
