Moonshot AI is in talks to raise capital at a valuation of as much as $50 billion ahead of a planned Hong Kong initial public offering, according to Bloomberg. The Beijing-based startup intends to begin those discussions in August, after closing a current funding round that values it at $31.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
The upcoming round would be the last outside investment Moonshot accepts before taking the company public, with a listing possible before year's end. The company is also working to finish unwinding its offshore red-chip structure before August, a step that would clear the path for onshore capital raises and the broader work of preparing for a listing, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
The rapid capital-raising push follows strong momentum in Moonshot's business. The company reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue in June, up from $200 million in April. Since Kimi K3 went live, revenue generated each day has climbed by a factor of at least six.
That model, Kimi K3, rattled Chinese AI competitor stocks and sent semiconductor indexes lower last week when Moonshot released it. The 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model placed below Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 in overall capability rankings but outperformed both companies' previous-generation models across coding and general agent evaluations, according to Artificial Analysis. Arena blind evaluations showed developers selecting Kimi K3 ahead of leading U.S. models on front-end coding tasks.
The launch drew attention from prominent figures in the technology industry. Elon Musk described the model as "impressive," and Dean Ball, who leads strategy at OpenAI, cautioned that releasing it as open-weight moves the broader technology sector toward what he termed "full AI communism." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that Washington intends to scrutinize foreign open-source AI models, China's among them, and respond wherever it finds signs that American companies' intellectual property has been stolen.
Moonshot was started in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a 33-year-old who studied at Carnegie Mellon University and held roles at Meta $META and Google $GOOGL before launching the company. Its existing investors include Meituan, Tencent, IDG Capital, China Mobile, and the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund.
The company had previously raised capital at a valuation above $20 billion in a Meituan-led round in May, according to prior reporting.