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 financing, Kimi has raised over $3.9 billion in less than six months, setting a record for continuous financing in domestic large models in recent years.

A Surprising Comeback

After a 16-month funding drought, Kimi has once again become a sought-after investment target. An investor from Shanghai noted that in January, Zhipu AI and MiniMax went public, with total market values exceeding 200 billion and 400 billion HKD, respectively, effectively providing a pricing anchor for domestic large models. Previously, Kimi’s valuation after its last funding round in December was only $4.3 billion (approximately 33.7 billion HKD), creating an attractive entry point for investors.

The 16-Month Drought

In late 2022, the emergence of ChatGPT prompted Yang Zhilin, who had conducted large model research at Google Brain and Meta AI, to visit Silicon Valley for two months. Upon returning, he founded Moonshot AI in April 2023.

Within two months, the company completed nearly 2 billion yuan in angel round financing led by Sequoia China and ZhenFund, followed by an A round financing led by Meituan Longzhu a month later.

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 financing round, achieving a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion, with investors including Alibaba, Xiaohongshu, and existing shareholders like Sequoia China and Meituan. In August of the same year, it raised over $300 million in a B round, reaching 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, Jietou Xingchen, Baichuan, and Lingyi Wanwu.

User Acquisition Strategies

To attract users, Moonshot AI spent over 200 million yuan on advertising in a single month during its peak, increasing monthly active users from 4 million to 12.82 million within six months, capturing the second-largest market share. However, the emergence of DeepSeek raised questions about the sustainability of the ‘AI Six Dragons’.

In early 2025, DeepSeek-R1 achieved performance close to GPT-4 at a very low cost, shocking the industry. Additionally, DeepSeek gained over 100 million new users in just seven days without any advertising, rendering the costly advertising race meaningless and leading investors to adopt a cautious stance towards foundational large models.

From February 2025, Moonshot AI significantly reduced its advertising budget, refocusing on technology itself by investing in the K2 trillion-parameter model and upgrading verticals in healthcare and law, seeking cash flow through membership subscriptions and API commercialization. Concurrently, peers like Lingyi Wanwu and Baichuan shifted from foundational training to small models and industry solutions, while Zhipu pushed for GLM open-source focusing on government and enterprise, and MiniMax strengthened its B-end 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. The industry was further shaken as K2 achieved breakthroughs in code generation and agent task handling, surpassing GPT-4.1 in benchmark tests like LiveCodeBench.

Investor Confidence Returns

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

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

This round of financing 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 financing, raising $500 million, $700 million, and another $700 million, with valuations quadrupling since August 2024.

Commercial Revival Through Technological Breakthroughs

In an internal letter released on the last day of 2025, Yang Zhilin stated that 2025 was a year 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 financing, significantly oversubscribed, with current cash holdings exceeding 10 billion yuan.

The internal letter revealed that Kimi began frequently launching new agent features from May, introducing Researcher, OK Computer, PPT, Kimi Code, and others, enhancing functionality. Leveraging the SOTA performance of the K2 model, C-end commercialization achieved exponential growth, with monthly growth rates of over 170% in paid users both domestically and overseas from September to November. The launch of K2 Thinking also significantly boosted API revenue, with overseas API income increasing fourfold during the same period.

At CES 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 Zhilin was the only invited speaker from a Chinese large model company.

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

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

These series of ‘out-of-the-box’ actions ignited the market. Since the launch of Kimi Claw, the revenue within just 20 days of January has surpassed the entire revenue of 2025. According to global payment platform Stripe data, Kimi’s personal subscription user payment orders increased by over 8000% month-on-month in January, with another increase of over 120% in February, ranking in the top ten of Stripe’s global list. Additionally, Similarweb data showed that after the release of K2.5, the daily visits to Kimi’s overseas API open platform surged by 10 to 20 times.

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