China’s Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B valuation as demand for open-source AI skyrockets
Key takeaways
- The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
- The company raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital.
- The company s latest model, Kimi K2.6, is currently the second-most used LLM on distribution platform, OpenRouter.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open-source models are still facing no shortage of interest from those who don t mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice.
Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some investors who participated in the round.
The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Also participating were Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng, according to the post.