Moonshot AI
Series D
Moonshot AI develops large language models and delivers them through the Kimi AI assistant and a developer API platform.
Moonshot AI raised approximately $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation in May 2026, led by Meituan Long-Z, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. This financing represents one of the largest private funding rounds for a Chinese AI company in 2026.
The company's valuation trajectory accelerated from $300 million at seed stage to $20 billion in May 2026. Founder Yang Zhilin maintains a 78.968% ownership stake. Moonshot AI is actively evaluating a Hong Kong IPO as a potential path to public markets.
Moonshot AI's product line centers on Kimi, an AI assistant delivered through the web, mobile apps, desktop clients, and a browser extension, and on the Kimi developer platform, which sells metered API access to the same underlying models and bundles tools for web search, memory, code execution, and file analysis.
As of July 2026 the current flagship is Kimi K3, released on July 16, 2026, a natively multimodal open-weight model with a one-million-token context window. Earlier K-series releases stay in service alongside it, including the general-purpose K2.6 model and the K2.7 Code coding model, both offering 256,000-token context windows.
Moonshot AI's central advantage is releasing frontier-scale models as open weights, so developers can download, self-host, and adapt the same systems the company serves commercially, a structural contrast with labs that keep flagship models closed. A widely used consumer assistant sits above that release strategy and supplies continuous real-world usage.
The company competes on price and long-context capability rather than exclusivity. Its published platform rates as of July 2026 put the Kimi K3 flagship at $3.00 per million input tokens with cached input at $0.30 per million, and its flagship and coding models advertise context windows of one million and 256,000 tokens respectively.
Publishing flagship weights caps how much Moonshot AI can charge for model access, because customers and rivals alike can run comparable systems on their own hardware, and derivative builders inherit the company's engineering without paying for it.
It also competes against proprietary frontier labs with deeper enterprise distribution and larger compute supply. Coverage of the Kimi K3 release in July 2026 described the model as closing much of the gap to leading United States systems while still trailing the strongest closed models.
Moonshot AI's pricing posture pairs an assistant distributed directly to users through web, mobile, and desktop clients with metered developer access billed per million tokens, while open weights give teams a third route: self-hosting a released model instead of paying per call.
Published platform rates as of July 2026 ran $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens for the Kimi K3 flagship, with the K2.6 and K2.7 Code models listed at $0.95 input and $4.00 output, and cached input discounted to between $0.16 and $0.30 per million tokens depending on the model.
Moonshot AI develops large language models and delivers them through the Kimi AI assistant and a developer API platform.