Who's who · Chinese labs
Moonshot AI
Beijing AI company behind the Kimi assistant and Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2023
- Based in
- Beijing, China
- People
- Yang Zhilin, Founder
- Known for
- Kimi, Kimi K3, Kimi K2.6
- Licence
- Open weights under Moonshot's own Kimi licences
- Funding
- Private; valued at $20bn (May 2026)
- Annual recurring revenue
- $300 million (June 2026, reported)
- Website
- https://www.moonshot.ai
Moonshot AI is a Chinese AI company founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former researcher at Google Brain and Meta AI. It makes the Kimi chatbot and the Kimi family of models, which it sells through subscriptions and an API (a service that lets other software use its models).
Moonshot is known for very large open-weight models aimed at coding and agent tasks. Kimi K2.6 became one of the most used models on the OpenRouter platform. Kimi K3, published as open weights on 28 July 2026, has 2.8 trillion parameters and a one-million-token context window, and was the largest open-weight model available when it came out. It uses Moonshot's own Kimi K3 licence. Demand after the launch led Moonshot to pause new subscriptions for a time.
Moonshot raised about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation in May 2026, in a round led by Long-Z, the investment arm of Meituan, and reported annual recurring revenue of $300 million by June. In February 2026 Anthropic named Moonshot as one of three Chinese labs it said had used Claude to train their own models.
Sources
- Moonshot AI (Hugging Face), moonshotai/Kimi-K3, 2026-07-28
- TechCrunch, China's Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B valuation as demand for open source AI skyrockets, 2026-05-07
- Caixin Global, Moonshot Open-Sources Kimi K3 as U.S.-China AI Tensions Intensify, 2026-07-29
- TechCrunch, Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports, 2026-02-23
Facts last checked 2026-10-02