Moonshot AI

Kimi K2.5 (January 2026) adds native vision via the MoonViT encoder, and K2.6 (April 2026) becomes the #2 most-used LLM on OpenRouter, with customers including Cursor, DoorDash and Thinking Machines; ARR quadruples past $200M by April.

On May 7, 2026 Moonshot closes a $2B round led by Meituan's Long-Z Investments at a $20B valuation — the largest single raise in China's LLM sector — and weeks later begins dismantling its offshore red-chip structure to clear the way for a Hong Kong IPO, with a further $1–2B sought at a $30B valuation.

On July 16, 2026 Moonshot releases Kimi K3 — a ~2.8-trillion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts model with 1M-token context and the new Kimi Delta Attention (6.3x faster long-context decoding) — the largest open-weight model ever released, which the company and early benchmarks position as competitive with the best closed US frontier models at $3/$15 per million tokens.

In July 2025 Moonshot releases Kimi K2 — a 1-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model (32B active) — under a modified MIT license, pivoting the company to an open-weight frontier strategy.

In November 2025 Kimi K2 Thinking — trained for a reported ~$4.6M — scores 44.9% on Humanity's Last Exam, 60.2% on BrowseComp and 71.3% on SWE-Bench Verified, beating closed frontier models on several agentic benchmarks and validating the open-weight approach.

In February 2024 Moonshot raises $1B led by Alibaba (which takes a 36% stake) at a $2.5B valuation, followed by a $300M round with Tencent and Gaorong at $3.3B in August — by which point Kimi ranks third in China by monthly active users.

Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin — all Tsinghua University alumni — found Moonshot AI in Beijing in March 2023, naming it after Pink Floyd's 'The Dark Side of the Moon.'

In October 2023 Moonshot launches the Kimi chatbot with a 200,000-Chinese-character context window — the longest available at the time — establishing long context as its signature capability (expanded to 2 million characters in March 2024).