Moonshot AI

What it is

Moonshot AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that builds large language models and runs the Kimi assistant. It was founded in Beijing in March 2023 by three schoolfriends from Tsinghua University: Yang Zhilin, who serves as chief executive, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin ^[1]. It launched on the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, and its Chinese name, 月之暗面, means the dark side of the moon ^[1]. The company is headquartered in the JD Technology Building in Beijing's Haidian District ^[1]. At the time of its first funding it had 40 employees; by 2026 the headcount was about 300 ^[1].

Kimi and the model line

Its main product is Kimi, an assistant launched in October 2023 with a very long context window ^[2]. Context window is the amount of text a model can keep in view at once; a large one lets a user paste in long documents, code bases or transcripts and ask questions across all of it, rather than feeding the model a few paragraphs at a time. That emphasis on long input was Kimi's early selling point.

The models behind the assistant arrived in quick succession: Kimi k1.5 in January 2025, Kimi-VL in April 2025, Kimi K2 in July 2025, K2 Thinking in November 2025, K2.5 in January 2026, K2.6 in April 2026, K3 in July 2026 and K3.1 Pro in October 2026 ^[1][2][3]. The company's own site describes K3 as launched in July 2026 with 2.8 trillion parameters and a new architecture, and lists K3.1 Pro, dated 24 October 2026, as a 3-trillion-parameter-class model with a 1-million-token context window ^[3].

Serving at scale

Running a chatbot for many users is its own engineering problem, separate from training the model. Moonshot's Mooncake serving platform for Kimi processes 100 billion tokens a day, and it won the USENIX FAST Erik Riedel Best Paper Award ^[1].

Funding

Moonshot has raised money at a pace that has tracked its model releases. An initial round of US$60 million valued the company at US$300 million; a US$1 billion round led by Alibaba in February 2024 valued it at US$2.5 billion; and a US$300 million round with Tencent and Gaorong in August 2024 valued it at US$3.3 billion ^[1]. In May 2026 The Standard reported that the company was on the verge of closing a US$2 billion round at a valuation topping US$20 billion ^[4], and a round at a US$35 billion valuation was reported on 30 July 2026 ^[5]. The Standard also reported that Moonshot had completed three funding rounds in 2026, raising over US$3.9 billion including the May round, and that its valuation had climbed from US$4.3 billion in November 2025 ^[4].

On the revenue side, Wikipedia reports annual recurring revenue of US$200–300 million in April 2026 ^[1][4].

Disputes

In 2026 Anthropic accused Moonshot of distillation through fraudulent accounts — that is, using another company's model to generate training data — alleging in September that 5,380 accounts had been involved in more than 23 million exchanges, mainly with Claude Opus ^[1]. China's Cyberspace Administration opened an investigation covering Moonshot and DeepSeek the same month ^[1]. Separately, in July 2026 Bloomberg reported that Moonshot had access to 20,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs supplied by Alibaba Cloud, an account Alibaba denied ^[1].

Where it sits

Read together, the record is one of speed: eight model releases between January 2025 and October 2026, repeated funding rounds at rising valuations, and a consumer assistant that has been the company's public face since October 2023 ^[1][2][3]. Moonshot reportedly considered a Hong Kong IPO in March 2026 ^[1].