China’s Moonshot AI passes funding goal to hit $45.2 billion valuation

NEW YORK – Moonshot AI secured a US$35 billion (S$45.21 billion) valuation after raising a larger-than-anticipated US$3.5 billion in a just-closed round of financing, riding the momentum from a breakthrough Kimi K3 model that sent ripples through Silicon Valley.

The Beijing-based start-up managed to secure far more than the US$1 billion to US$2 billion it initially targeted, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified to talk about private information.

Moonshot is now reaching out to potential backers for a new funding round at a US$50 billion pre-money valuation, aiming to secure capital a final time before an initial public offering in Hong Kong as soon as 2026. A Moonshot spokesperson did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

The Chinese start-up’s frenetic deal-making underscores the enormous investor interest in a private firm that in July leapt to the forefront of the industry with the K3, which approached the performance of frontier models by Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

Its debut triggered a sell-off in tech stocks and was hailed as another “DeepSeek moment” – providing evidence that the country’s AI labs can keep pace with the US, despite export curbs and computing constraints.

Moonshot on July 27 released its weights – the numeric values the model learnt during training – allowing developers to download, tweak and host the technology freely. 

Moonshot’s success has also thrust it into the centre of US-Chinese tensions. A White House official accused the company of training the K3 on restricted Nvidia chips, while reiterating allegations of distillation – the practice of extracting outputs from top competitors to boost performance.

Moonshot has not responded to requests for comment on the matter.

Moonshot developed the K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters – a rough measure of AI complexity – making it the world’s largest open-weight model at a time when US rivals keep their technology proprietary. The model also features a one million-token context window, enabling it to process massive documents or codebases in a single prompt. 

Moonshot achieved US$300 million of annual recurring revenue – a gauge of future sales – in June, jumping from US$200 million in April, Bloomberg News reported earlier. Since the K3’s launch, daily sales have surged at least six times, one person familiar with the matter has said. BLOOMBERG