DeepSeek crashed the stock market in January. A different Chinese AI startup did it again. This one is three years old and was worth $300 million when it started. Yesterday it closed at $35 billion. The company is Moonshot AI, named after Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Founded on the album's 50th anniversary in March 2023. The founder is Yang Zhilin, 33, from Shantou, a port city in southern China. He won math olympiad prizes as a teenager and got early admission to Tsinghua, China's MIT. He went to Carnegie Mellon for his PhD and finished in four years. While there he co-authored two papers on how language models handle long text, both now considered foundational. One of them, XLNet, outperformed Google's BERT on 20 benchmarks when it launched. He published alongside two Turing Award winners. His advisor later called him "absolutely brilliant." He was widely sought after, but he went back to China. In March 2023, he co-founded Moonshot with two Tsinghua classmates. The product is Kimi, a chatbot built around giving the model a massive memory. Kimi's context window holds a million tokens. That's roughly seven novels in a single prompt. Kimi took off fast in China. Revenue hit $200 million annualized in April 2026. By June it was $300 million. This month, Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model, the largest open-weight in the world. It approached the performance of Anthropic and OpenAI's best closed models. Tech stocks sold off. The DeepSeek comparisons started immediately. The biggest AI companies in America keep their models locked. Yang released his weights for free. The $3.5 billion round was led by China's National AI Investment Fund, the same state fund that backs DeepSeek. Meituan led an earlier $2 billion round in May, with Alibaba and Tencent also in. Moonshot originally targeted $1 to $2 billion for this round. Investors gave them nearly double. The company is already raising again at $50 billion, with a Hong Kong IPO planned for this year. The White House has accused Moonshot of training K3 on restricted Nvidia chips. Moonshot hasn't responded. From $300 million to $35 billion in three years, built in a country where ChatGPT is banned, by a 33-year-old who wanted to be a rock musician.