China's Moonshot AI has closed a funding round of $3.5 billion at a $35 billion valuation — far above the $1 billion to $2 billion it initially targeted — tripling the Beijing-based startup's value in six months, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The company is already reaching out to potential backers for a new round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, aiming to raise capital one final time before an initial public offering in Hong Kong that could come as soon as this year.
The windfall rides on Kimi K3, the open-weight model released this month with 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window — the world's largest open-weight model at a time when US rivals keep their technology proprietary. Its debut triggered a selloff in tech stocks and was hailed as another "DeepSeek moment," evidence that Chinese AI labs can keep pace with the US despite export curbs and computing constraints.
The momentum shows in the numbers: Moonshot reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue in June, up from $200 million in April, and daily sales have reportedly surged at least sixfold since K3's launch. On Monday the company released K3's weights, letting developers download, tweak and host the technology freely.
Success has also thrust Moonshot into the center of US-China tensions. A White House official accused the company of training K3 on restricted Nvidia chips and of distilling outputs from top competitors; Moonshot has not responded to requests for comment.
