Moonshot AI has secured a $35 billion valuation after closing a $3.5 billion funding round, far exceeding the $1 billion to $2 billion the Beijing-based startup initially targeted, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is now approaching potential backers for another round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, aiming to raise capital once more ahead of a planned Hong Kong IPO as soon as this year.
The surge in investor interest follows the release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, which approached the performance of frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI and triggered a selloff in tech stocks, drawing comparisons to DeepSeek’s earlier disruption of the industry. Moonshot released K3’s weights openly this week, making it the largest open-weight model in the world at 2.8 trillion parameters, with a 1 million-token context window for processing large documents or codebases.
The model’s success has drawn scrutiny from Washington, with a White House official alleging K3 was trained on restricted Nvidia chips and reiterating distillation concerns. Moonshot has not responded to those allegations. The company’s annual recurring revenue reportedly reached $300 million in June, up from $200 million in April.
