Moonshot AI Raises $2B at $20B+ Valuation

Chinese artificial intelligence lab Moonshot AI has raised $2 billion in funding at a valuation exceeding $20 billion. The round was led by the venture capital arm of Meituan, China's largest food delivery company.

The investment comes just weeks after Moonshot AI released its newest model, Kimi-K2.6, an open-source large language model with about 1 trillion parameters. The model features a module that compresses its KV cache into a latent space, reducing memory footprint.

Moonshot AI also offers Kimi-VL, an open-source vision-language model optimized for processing visual data, especially from videos.

The company monetizes its open-source tech through a paid chatbot service, Kimi, available in five subscription tiers. Annualized revenue from paid products topped $200 million before this raise.

One of its main rivals, DeepSeek, is reportedly in talks to raise its first outside investment at a $45 billion valuation.