Beijing-based AI lab Moonshot AI has raised about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to a post from Huafeng Capital, signaling continued investor appetite for Chinese open-weight large language models even as Chinese AI companies operate with smaller funding pools than their Western counterparts.
The round was led by Long-Z Investment, the venture capital arm of Chinese food delivery company Meituan, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng also participated, according to Huafeng’s post. The company has now raised $3.9 billion over the past six months. Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, more than doubled to $10 billion by early 2026 following a $700 million raise, and has now climbed to $20 billion.
Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher. The company became one of China’s most popular AI labs earlier this year after its open-weight Kimi K2.5 large language model took the coding world by storm, nearly topping benchmarks and posting performance figures close to OpenAI and Anthropic models available at the time. Its latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second-most used large language model on distribution platform OpenRouter.
The fundraising comes as investor appetite for open-weight AI models built by Chinese labs surges. Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage, according to Huafeng’s post.
DeepSeek, perhaps the most popular Chinese AI lab, is reportedly in talks to raise outside capital for the first time at a valuation of about $45 billion. Some of Moonshot’s rivals have already gone public on the back of demand for their AI models. Zhipu AI, which trades in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, ended Thursday with a market cap of HK$434.7 billion, or roughly $55.9 billion, while MiniMax closed at HK$257.3 billion, or about $33 billion, after both stocks rallied on new model releases.
Moonshot’s Kimi models compete globally with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, as well as ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai and DeepSeek. The company’s existing backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan — formerly known as Sequoia China — ZhenFund, IDG Capital and 5Y Capital.
