Author: Dongcha Beating
Kimi has completed a financing round exceeding $3.5 billion, with its valuation rising to $35 billion; the Pre-IPO round has already been launched.
Kimi has just opened the model weights for K3, and Yue's latest round of funding has been finalized.
According to exclusive information from a reporter at the Science and Technology Daily, Moonshot AI has completed its Series F funding round, raising over $3.5 billion, with a post-money valuation of $35 billion.
This round of financing was not originally intended to raise this much capital. According to reports, due to investor demand exceeding the original target by more than three times, Moonshot prematurely closed its Series F. The planned Series G financing, initially set to begin in August this year, has also been accelerated.
Round G will be the Pre-IPO round before the listing of the Dark Side of the Moon, with the pre-money valuation already rising to $50 billion.
A week ago, the market version was that Moonshot AI would launch its final private financing round in August after completing a pre-money financing round with a valuation of approximately $31.5 billion. Now, the Series F financing has exceeded $3.5 billion, pushing the post-money valuation to $35 billion, and the next round is no longer waiting until August. The funding and valuation have arrived faster than originally planned.
Since its founding in 2023, Moonshot has increased its valuation from $300 million to $35 billion in just over three years. The ongoing Pre-IPO round has set the next valuation target at $50 billion.
Raised over ten rounds of funding in three years, with valuation rising from $300 million to $35 billion
Moonshot AI was founded in April 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhang Yutao, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin.
Approximately two months after its founding, the company completed a $200 million seed round, valuing it at around $300 million post-investment. For an AI large model startup that has not yet officially launched its product, this represents an exceptionally large early-stage funding round.
What truly brought Moonshot into the center of the capital table was its A+ round of funding completed in February 2024.
This round of funding exceeded $1 billion, led by Alibaba, with participation from institutions and industrial capital including Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, and Meituan, pushing Moonshot AI’s valuation to approximately $2.5 billion. Six months later, the Series B round raised over $300 million, further increasing the company’s valuation to $3.3 billion.
However, after that funding round in 2024, Moonshot's fundraising pace slowed down for a while.
This year, the Chinese large model market has undergone significant changes. Major companies like ByteDance and Alibaba have continuously lowered model prices, while DeepSeek has rapidly risen through open-source initiatives and cost efficiency. Competition in general-purpose chat products has gradually shifted from user growth to model capabilities, inference costs, and revenue generation. Kimi once gained prominence with its long-context capability, but relying solely on a single product label is no longer sufficient to support a higher valuation.
By the end of 2025, Moonshot completed a $500 million Series C round, achieving a post-money valuation of $4.3 billion. Since then, the company has significantly accelerated its fundraising efforts.
In the first two months of 2026, Moonshot AI completed multiple funding rounds, with its valuation rising from $4.3 billion to $10 billion, and further reaching $18 billion.
In May of this year, the company completed another D-round financing of approximately $2 billion, bringing its post-money valuation to $20 billion. The participants are no longer limited to internet companies and market-driven investment institutions; China Mobile, Guozhi Investment, CPE Source Peak, and several state-owned capital-backed funds have also joined the shareholder list.
The Series D round just concluded, and a new funding round was launched in June. At the time, the pre-money valuation circulating in the market had already reached $31.5 billion. Today, this round has closed with a total funding amount exceeding $3.5 billion, raising the post-money valuation of Moonshot AI to $35 billion.
Looking back at this funding curve, the most noticeable change occurred over the past six months.
By the end of 2025, Moonshot's valuation was still $4.3 billion. More than six months later, this figure has reached $35 billion, an increase of more than sevenfold. If the next round is completed with a pre-money valuation of $50 billion, Moonshot's valuation increase over three years will exceed 160 times.
The reasons given by investors are becoming increasingly direct. Previously, investors bet on Yang ZhiLin and a team of technicians from Tsinghua University; now, they are betting on whether Moonshot can become one of the few Chinese companies still at the table of global frontier models.
After K3, Moonshot returned to the center of the table.
This round of funding closed early, right after the release of Kimi K3.
On July 16, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3. On July 27, the company further opened the full model weights, technical report, and some key infrastructure technologies of K3.
K3 is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion total parameters and 104 billion activated parameters per inference, supporting a 1 million token context window, along with capabilities in vision, programming, reasoning, and long-term tool usage.
Moonshot AI's technical report states that K3 achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks including long-range programming, agents, knowledge, reasoning, and vision. Its overall capabilities are now very close to those of the strongest proprietary models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
Ranks can change at any time, and even the model company’s own tests should be approached with caution. K3’s more significant impact is that it has pushed the boundaries of what open-weight models can achieve even further.
For a long time, open-source models have primarily played the role of followers. Closed-source companies were responsible for training the most powerful models, and six months to a year later, the open-source community would reproduce some of those capabilities at a much lower cost.
K3 changed this time gap. A Chinese company has directly opened up a model with capabilities approaching the global frontier, allowing other developers to download, modify, and deploy it, as well as continue training their own models based on it.
The model certainly did not become cheaper as a result. The K3 weight files exceed 1.5 TB, and even loading the full model requires multiple high-end accelerator cards. For production deployment, hardware investment may be substantial. Its "openness" primarily addresses whether enterprises can control the model and break free from reliance on a single API provider—not whether everyone can run it on their home computer.
Even so, open weights still impact the business of closed-source companies.
When a sufficiently powerful model can be downloaded, companies have the opportunity to deploy it on their own servers, keeping data internal, customizing the model, and avoiding perpetual payments tied to a company’s token price. The competitive advantage previously built by closed-source models through superior performance will also be eroded more quickly.
After the release of K3, the debate quickly moved beyond technical rankings into the realm of U.S. AI industry policy and commercial interests.
Behind the debate between open-source and closed-source
On July 24, companies and organizations including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Meta, and Hugging Face publicly supported open-weight models and opposed the U.S. government’s rush to restrict AI models available for download and deployment.
Anthropic and Amazon did not appear on the signing list. This has led to external speculation that Anthropic may be using the guise of security and national security to restrict the development of open models and shield its proprietary business from competition.
On the same day K3 opened its weights, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an article addressing the controversy.
He stated that Anthropic has never advocated for a complete ban on open-weight models, and that open models without dangerous capabilities are a public good that can reduce usage costs and create value for businesses, developers, and researchers.
But Amodei's core position has not changed.
He still advocates continuing to restrict the flow of advanced chips and chip manufacturing equipment to China, targeting so-called "industrial-scale model distillation," and requiring models with sufficient capability to undergo mandatory safety testing before release, regardless of whether they are open-source or closed-source.
On the surface, this debate is about security, but beneath it lies a very practical business issue.
Closed-source companies aim to maintain control over the most powerful models by charging fees through APIs and subscription services; open models, on the other hand, enable broader access to capabilities across more companies, drive down prices, and narrow the gap between newcomers and industry leaders. The faster the openness, the harder it becomes for a few companies to indefinitely lock model capabilities within their own servers.
K3 is from China, large in scale and with capabilities approaching the cutting edge. For supporters of open models, K3 demonstrates that the open approach can still produce top-tier models; for Anthropic, it also means that the advantage built by U.S. companies through massive spending may spread more rapidly.
The dark side of the moon has thus acquired a capital value it did not have before.
It is no longer just an AI application company with a large user base in China, nor just a foundational model startup waiting for its business model to mature. After the release of K3, it has been revalued within the context of global competition between open-source and closed-source models, the U.S. and China, and model capabilities versus compute control.
A $3.5 billion funding round and a $35 billion valuation are the answers provided by the capital markets.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitpushNewsCN
BitPush Telegram community: https://t.me/BitPushCommunity
BitPush TG subscription: https://t.me/bitpush