
Moonshot AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence company developing large language models and the Kimi AI assistant.
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.
Kimi is Moonshot AI's flagship AI assistant launched in October 2023, supporting online search, deep thinking, multimodal reasoning, and ultra-long text conversations up to 2 million Chinese characters. Powered by self-developed LLMs including K2.5 and K2.6, Kimi is available via web, mobile app, and API to consumers and developers globally.
The assistant handles complex document analysis, coding assistance, and real-time information retrieval through integrated search capabilities. Its ultra-long context window distinguishes it from competing products in the Chinese and international AI assistant markets.
Kimi K2.5 and K2.6 models are open-source under a modified MIT license, delivering frontier performance at API costs 76% below Claude Opus. The K2.6 release leads on SWE-Bench Pro, Humanity's Last Exam, and DeepSearchQA benchmarks, positioning Moonshot AI as a top-tier Chinese LLM provider.
Agent Swarm coordinates up to 100 parallel sub-agents for complex task execution. Kimi ranks as the second-most-used LLM on OpenRouter, demonstrating strong adoption among developers and enterprises seeking cost-effective alternatives to Western AI models.
Moonshot AI operates a dual revenue model combining consumer subscription top-ups ranging from 5.2 yuan to 399 yuan per year with developer API access. API pricing is set at $0.60 per million input tokens and $2.50 to $3.00 per million output tokens, significantly undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic pricing.
Consumer subscriptions provide priority inference access, while the developer platform targets enterprises building applications on Moonshot AI's model infrastructure. The company reported ARR exceeding $200 million in April 2026, driven by rapid user growth in domestic and international markets.