Moonshot AI valuation surges to $4.8 billion as Chinese AI startup closes fresh funding round

Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI's valuation is up $500 million, sources say, after its rivals IPO in Hong Kong

BEIJING -- An Alibaba-backed AI startup is currently being valued at $4.8 billion in a fresh funding round, two people with knowledge of the deal said, just weeks after it was valued at $4.3 billion. Moonshot AI is the company behind the Kimi chatbot, which surged in popularity in China months before DeepSeek's release last year. Since Moonshot's previous in December, rival Chinese AI companies -- Zhipu and MiniMax -- surged after going public in Hong Kong. The sources told CNBC that Moonshot was closing a funding round that will value it at least $500 million higher than the December round. The sources said the round would likely close soon due to high demand. Both asked to remain anonymous while discussing private information. Moonshot AI had not responded to a request for comment as this article went live. The sources added that the company could be valued even higher in subsequent rounds that could follow, due to a surge of interest in Chinese AI IPO candidates. Chinese AI companies have particularly boomed as U.S. AI chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, aren't officially available in mainland China. Beijing restricts access to many U.S.-based internet services, while American companies have faced growing restrictions from the White House on doing business with China. The previous funding round was announced on Dec. 31. IDG, Alibaba and Tencent participated in it, according to Chinese financial news outlet LatePost. Moonshot AI has not commented on any plans for an IPO. Zhipu, listed under the name Knowledge Atlas, had a market value of $13 billion as of Monday's close, according to Wind Information data. MiniMax was worth $15.2 billion, the data showed.

China's Moonshot AI to close on another massive funding round after its two biggest rivals go public - SiliconANGLE

China's Moonshot AI to close on another massive funding round after its two biggest rivals go public Moonshot AI, one of China's top large language model developers, is set to increase its valuation to $4.8 billion via a new round of funding, just weeks after closing on a $500 million raise. The news comes via CNBC, which cited two anonymous sources as saying that the round, which is still under discussion but expected to close imminently, will value Moonshot AI at least $500 million higher than the figure quoted in December, following its previous raise. The sources expect the round to close imminently due to "high demand." The startup, officially known as Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd., is one of China's "AI Tigers," together with other leading model makers such as MiniMax and Z.ai. The name likens the group to the high-growth economies of the four "Asian Tigers" - Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Like its rivals, Moonshot AI is striving to compete with U.S. model makers such as OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC and Google LLC, developing foundational models that could one day achieve artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that exceed the cognitive abilities of humans. Moonshot AI is best known for its flagship AI model Kimi K2 Thinking, which launched in December as the default engine in its Kimi chatbot tool. Kimi 2 Thinking is one of the world's best-performing open-weight LLMs, ranking higher than both OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 on a number of leading AI benchmarks. The one-trillion-parameter model was designed as a "thinking agent" that's able to reason about problems in a step-by-step way and use third-party software such as browsers, search engines and data retrieval tools to execute tasks on behalf of users. Since Moonshot AI's last funding round in December, its two main rivals have both raked in millions of dollars after going public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The first to do so was MiniMax, which raised $619 million through its initial public offering, with Z.ai following just two days later, raising $560 million. Both stocks have surged since their market debut, with MiniMax's value soaring to around $15.2 billion and Z.ai's at around $13 billion, sparking greater interest in Moonshot AI's plans. However, unlike its rivals, Moonshot AI has resisted the lure of the public markets, and following its previous round, its founder and Chief Executive Yang Zhilin insisted that it has no plans to launch an IPO in the short term. Instead, he seems happy to make do with private funding for now, and CNBC's sources said that the company could follow up with subsequent rounds in the coming weeks and months. China's AI Tigers have grown phenomenally over the last couple of years because American chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini aren't available in the country, in line with Beijing's policies that restrict access to many U.S.-based internet services. American companies also face significant restrictions when trying to do business in China, which has instead given birth to its own massive technology industry, led by names such as Alibaba, Tencent Corp. and Baidu Inc. The former two tech giants have both invested in Moonshot AI via earlier rounds.