Moonshot AI, one of China’s leading ‘AI Tigers,’ raises $500M to fill its AI infrastructure war chest – News

Chinese large language model developer Moonshot AI has reportedly raised $500 million in funding at a time when its domestic artificial intelligence rivals are gearing up to hit the public markets.

The Series C funding round was first reported by the South China Morning Post, which named IDG Capital as the lead investor, laying out $150 million. Existing stakeholders Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Corp. also participated in the round, along with others.

The startup, officially known as Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd., has been labeled an “AI Tiger,” along with other leading Chinese model makers such as Z.ai and MiniMax. The name likens them to the high-growth economies of the four “Asian Tigers” – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Like its rivals, Moonshot AI is striving to compete with U.S. model makers such as OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC and Google LLC, developing foundational models that could one day achieve artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that exceed the cognitive abilities of humans.

The new round brings Moonshot AI’s valuation to $4.3 billion, the SCMP reported. Importantly, it now has more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in its cash reserves, according to its founder and Chief Executive Yang Zhilin. This war chest, which will largely be spent on AI compute infrastructure, is the reason why Moonshot AI has not yet chosen to pursue an initial public offering, unlike MiniMax and Z.ai, the report said. “We’re in no rush for an IPO in the short term,” Yang said in an internal later to employees seen by the SCMP, though he did not rule out a listing in future.

MiniMax’s and Z.ai’s IPO plans became apparent earlier this week, with the latter company filing plans for its offering with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, seeking to raise $560 million. MiniMax has not yet filed, but reports in Chinese media claim it’s on the verge of doing so, seeking more than $600 million. Both IPOs are slated to launch later this month.

Last year, a U.S. government report singled out Moonshot AI as proof of the “growing depth” of China’s AI industry. It’s one of a number of Chinese model makers trying to develop world-leading “open-weight” LLMs, with its flagship model known as Kimi K2 Thinking, which launched in November. Kimi K2 Thinking outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 on a number of leading AI benchmarks, drawing praise from various AI experts, the SCMP said.

The 1 trillion-parameter Kimi K2 Thinking was designed as a “thinking agent,” the company said at the time. It’s capable of reasoning about problems step-by-step and using third-party software, including browsers, search engines and data retrieval tools. It’s able to execute between 200 and 300 sequential tool calls without supervision and reason across their use.

The launch of the model has helped to boost Moonshot AI’s revenue in overseas markets by almost four-times since it was launched, according to Yang’s internal letter to employees. Its number of paying subscribers has reportedly increased by 170% since the launch.

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