Moonshot AI closes $3.5 billion funding round to hit $35 billion valuation

Moonshot AI secured a $35 billion valuation after raising a larger-than-anticipated $3.5 billion in a just-closed round of financing, riding the momentum from a breakthrough Kimi K3 model that sent ripples through Silicon Valley.

The Beijing-based startup managed to secure far more than the $1 billion to $2 billion it initially targeted, people familiar with the matter said. The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund — the state vehicle that’s also a backer of DeepSeek’s — was among the lead investors in the round, the people said, asking not to be identified to talk about private information. Moonshot is now reaching out to potential backers for a new funding round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, aiming to secure capital a final time before an initial public offering in Hong Kong as soon as this year.

The Chinese startup’s frenetic deal-making underscores the enormous investor interest in a private firm that this month leapt to the forefront of the industry with the K3, which approached the performance of frontier models by Anthropic PBC and OpenAI. Its debut triggered a selloff in tech stocks and was hailed as another “DeepSeek moment” — providing evidence that the country’s AI labs can keep pace with the US despite export curbs and computing constraints.


Representatives for an investor in the National AI Industry Investment Fund and its manager didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. A Moonshot spokesperson didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

Moonshot on Monday released its weights — the numeric values the model learned during training — — allowing developers to download, tweak and host the technology freely.

Moonshot’s success has also thrust it into the center of US-Chinese tensions. A White House official accused the company of training the K3 on restricted Nvidia Corp. chips, while reiterating allegations of distillation — the practice of extracting outputs from top competitors to boost performance. Moonshot has not responded to requests for comment on the matter.

Moonshot developed the K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters — a rough measure of AI complexity — making it the world’s largest open-weight model at a time when US rivals keep their technology proprietary. The model also features a 1 million-token context window, enabling it to process massive documents or codebases in a single prompt.

Moonshot achieved $300 million of annual recurring revenue — a gauge of future sales — in June, jumping from $200 million in April, Bloomberg News reported earlier. Since the K3’s launch, daily sales have surged at least six times, one person familiar with the matter has said.