Kimi’s Upcoming Funding Round

On May 7, it was reported that Kimi (Moonshot AI) is about to complete a new funding round of $2 billion, with a post-money valuation exceeding $20 billion. This round is led by Meituan’s Longzhu, with participation from China Mobile, CPE, and others.

Notably, Kimi has completed three funding rounds this year alone. With this latest round, Kimi has raised over $3.9 billion in less than six months, setting a record for domestic large models in recent years.

A Remarkable Comeback

After a 16-month funding drought, Kimi has once again become a prime target for investors. An investor from Shanghai noted that in January, Zhipu AI and MiniMax went public, with market capitalizations surpassing HK$200 billion and HK$400 billion respectively, providing a pricing “anchor” for domestic large models. Kimi’s valuation after its last funding round in December was only $4.3 billion (approximately HK$33.7 billion), highlighting a significant gap that investors saw as an opportunity.

The 16-Month Funding Drought

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT emerged, prompting Yang Zhiling, who had previously worked on large models at Google Brain and Meta AI, to conduct a two-month study in Silicon Valley. He returned and founded Moonshot AI in April of the following year.

Within two months, the company completed nearly $3 billion in angel funding led by Sequoia China and ZhenFund, followed by an A round funding led by Meituan Longzhu.

In October 2023, Kimi launched a 200,000-word long text window, significantly surpassing GPT-4’s 25,000-word limit, attracting investor attention.

In February 2024, Moonshot AI completed a $1 billion funding round, reaching a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion, with investors including Alibaba and Xiaohongshu. In August of the same year, it raised over $300 million in a B round, achieving a valuation of $3.3 billion, co-led by Tencent and Alibaba.

At that time, Kimi was among the “AI Six Dragons” alongside Zhipu, MiniMax, Jietuo, Baichuan, and Lingyi.

To attract users, Moonshot AI spent over $2 million on advertising in a single month, boosting monthly active users from 4 million to 12.82 million within six months, increasing its market share to second place. However, with the emergence of DeepSeek, the “AI Six Dragons” faced scrutiny.

In early 2025, DeepSeek-R1 achieved performance close to GPT-4 at a very low cost, shocking the industry. Meanwhile, DeepSeek gained over 10 million new users in just seven days without any advertising, rendering the costly advertising battle meaningless and leading investors to adopt a cautious stance towards foundational large models.

Starting in February 2025, Moonshot AI significantly reduced its advertising budget, refocusing on technology itself: investing in the K2 trillion-parameter model and upgrading vertical scenarios in healthcare and law, seeking cash flow through membership subscriptions and API commercialization. Concurrently, competitors began to adjust their strategies: Lingyi and Baichuan shifted from foundational training to small models and industry solutions; Zhipu promoted GLM open-source and focused on government and enterprise; MiniMax strengthened B-end services while downplaying the “super app” narrative.

On July 11, 2025, Kimi K2 was officially released, becoming the world’s first open-source trillion-parameter model. More remarkably, K2 achieved breakthroughs in key capabilities such as code generation and agent task processing, surpassing GPT-4.1 in benchmark tests like LiveCodeBench.

Two days after K2’s release, the Token consumption on the OpenRouter platform surpassed xAI, topping the growth charts. Nature magazine referred to it as “the world witnessing another ‘DeepSeek moment.’”

This technological breakthrough boosted investor confidence. By the end of December 2025, Kimi completed a $500 million C round funding, led by IDG with $150 million, with existing shareholders like Alibaba and Tencent oversubscribing, reaching a post-money valuation of $4.3 billion.

This funding round came nearly 16 months after the previous one. Following this, investors flocked in, and from January to February 2026, Moonshot AI completed three rounds of funding, raising $500 million, $700 million, and $700 million respectively, with valuations quadrupling compared to August 2024.

Technological Breakthroughs Drive Business Recovery

On the last day of 2025, Yang Zhiling sent an internal letter stating that 2025 was a year full of breakthroughs for Kimi, laying the foundation for product explosion and rapid commercial progress. Thanks to these breakthroughs, the company recently completed a $500 million C round funding, significantly oversubscribing, with current cash holdings exceeding 10 billion yuan.

The internal letter revealed that Kimi’s products began to frequently launch new agent features from May, releasing new products like Researcher, OK Computer, PPT, and Kimi Code, with increasingly powerful functionalities. Leveraging the SOTA performance of the K2 model, C-end commercialization achieved exponential growth, with average month-over-month growth in overseas and domestic paid users exceeding 170% from September to November. Additionally, the release of K2 Thinking significantly boosted API revenue, with overseas API income growing fourfold during the same period.

At CES in early 2026, Huang Renxun showcased the performance of the next-generation GPU, using DeepSeek and Kimi K2-Thinking as benchmark models for the first time in history. At Nvidia’s annual GTC 2026 conference, Yang Zhiling was the only invited speaker among founders of Chinese large model companies.

In early February, Kimi was highlighted by OpenClaw, which announced Kimi K2.5 as the official main model, leading Moonshot AI to launch Kimi Claw, allowing users to utilize agent capabilities directly on the web without complex installations or hardware requirements.

In March, tech blogger Avi Chawla posted a detailed breakdown of a technical report recently released by the Kimi team on X. Shortly after the post, Elon Musk replied, stating, “Impressive work from Kimi.”

A series of “out-of-the-box” actions ignited the market. After the launch of Kimi Claw, the revenue from January 1 to February 20 exceeded the entire revenue of 2025. According to data from global payment platform Stripe, Kimi’s January personal subscription user payment orders increased by over 8000% month-over-month, with a further increase of over 120% in February, ranking among the top ten on Stripe’s global leaderboard. Additionally, Similarweb data showed that daily visits to Kimi’s overseas API open platform surged 10 to 20 times after the release of K2.5.

Recently, many interviewed tech investors believe that the competition in the domestic large model track has completely moved away from the early internet-style “parameter comparison and advertising spending” model, with “technical barriers + commercial monetization capability” becoming the consensus among investors. However, some investors remain concerned that under the constraints of computing power, future commercial growth may struggle to support such high valuations, necessitating caution against overheating in the sector.