Moonshot, the Beijing-based AI startup behind the Kimi chatbot, is targeting a US$10 billion (RM38.99 billion) valuation in an expansion of its ongoing funding round. The company, backed by Alibaba, Tencent, and 5Y Capital, hopes to tap growing investor interest in Chinese startups developing AI models to compete with Silicon Valley.
The startup recently secured US$500 million at a US$4.3 billion valuation and has already attracted over US$700 million in commitments from existing backers for the first tranche of the new round. Moonshot’s Kimi K2.5 chatbot is among the most popular large language models on the OpenRouter platform and ranks second in performance among open-source models, just behind Zhipu’s GLM-5.
Founded by ex-Tsinghua professor Yang Zhilin, who previously worked at Meta and Google, Moonshot offers subscription plans for its chatbot and enterprise AI solutions. While the company’s valuation would still be below rivals Zhipu and Minimax, both valued over US$29 billion, Moonshot has 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) in cash and is not rushing for an IPO.
User growth has surged over 170% month-on-month in late 2025, and the company recently launched a cloud service for paid users to host its OpenClaw AI agent.
