Moonshot AI Hits $18B: Kimi Boom Quadruples Valuation

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI is in talks for a new funding round of up to $1 billion that would value the startup at around $18 billion. As recently as late 2025, its valuation stood at $4.3 billion.

Valuation jump: $4.3 billion → $10 billion → $18 billion in less than three months.

The details

Moonshot was founded by Yang Zhilin, who previously worked on AI projects at Meta and Google.

Its core product: Chatbot Kimi, one of the most widely used AI assistants in China, with paid subscription tiers for consumers and technology licensing for enterprises.

The trigger behind the valuation surge: Kimi Claw. The new AI agent is based on the company’s in-house K2.5 model and has completely changed the business. After launch, Moonshot’s monthly revenue exceeded the company’s entire revenue for the previous year.

Investors: Alibaba, Tencent, and 5Y Capital increased their stakes in the $10 billion round. Who will join the $18 billion round has not yet been disclosed publicly.

Kimi Claw: the 24/7 money-printing machine

Kimi Claw is Moonshot’s cloud version of the open-source framework OpenClaw. Instead of just generating text, the AI agent autonomously carries out tasks.

How it works: It runs entirely in the browser, with no setup required. The agent works 24/7 in the cloud, even when the computer is turned off.
Foundation: Kimi’s K2.5 model, a 1-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that Moonshot released in January.
Use cases: Automated market reports, data analysis, writing and debugging code, sorting emails. There are more than 5,000 community-built skills on the company’s own “ClawHub.”

The China comparison

Moonshot is one of China’s “AI Six Tigers,” the startups competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. Rivals Zhipu and MiniMax are valued at $30–40 billion, and Moonshot is now catching up at $18 billion.

Rival comparison: Zhipu and MiniMax are already listed in Hong Kong, but both are still burning significantly more cash than they generate in revenue.

Zhipu posted a 2024 loss of RMB 2.47 billion on revenue of just RMB 312 million.
Moonshot is taking a different path: instead of pursuing an IPO, the startup is sitting on more than RMB 10 billion ($1.4 billion) in reserves, and Kimi Claw is delivering real revenue for the first time.

Sources: Bloomberg, SCMP, Tech Funding News