Chinese AI vendor Moonshot has raised funding of about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion.
The investment was confirmed in a statement from Huafeng Capital, which advised some of the backers, and constitutes Moonshot’s fourth major fund raise this year, as use of its open source Kimi chatbot and open source large language models continues to spike.
The latest round was led by Dragonball, the investment arm of Chinese tech giant Meituan, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng.
While not at the stratospheric level of funding that has become commonplace in the West over the past 12 months, the investment underscores growing investor interest in Chinese AI startups.
Moonshot has been building momentum since its founding, driven by the growing popularity of Kimi — which has seen subscriptions and API usage surge in recent months — and the Beijing-based lab is now the most heavily funded AI startup in China.
It may not hold that status for long, however, with recent media reports that rival DeepSeek is on a major fundraising drive at a valuation of $50 billion.
Moonshot’s latest $2 billion capital injection was preceded by three separate rounds of $500 million, $700 million and another $700 in the months of 2026, with Chinese giants Tencent and Alibaba among those investing.
The vendor’s value, meanwhile, has grown more than fourfold since November last year, when it was rated at around $4.9 billion, while its annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, according to the Huafeng Capital statement.
The latest version of Kimi, K2.6, was released earlier this year, and is currently ranked second in a global ranking of AI models based on token usage by the OpenRouter distribution platform — ahead of Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok.
