Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is now in talks to raise up to $1 billion in new funding, which could value the company at around $18 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The fundraising effort comes just months after the company secured more than $700 million earlier this year, a round that valued the startup at $10 billion.
Bloomberg reported that Moonshot’s valuation has surged quickly, rising from $4.3 billion after a $500 million funding round late last year.
Creator of Kimi
Moonshot AI is best known for developing the Kimi chatbot, one of China’s fastest-growing AI assistants. The company has recently begun discussions for its latest funding round, although it is not yet clear which investors will participate.
Existing backers such as Alibaba, Tencent, and 5Y Capital previously increased their investments when the company reached the $10 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported.
Other Chinese AI firms are also seeing large valuations. According to Bloomberg, companies like Zhipu and MiniMax have recently been valued between $30 billion and $40 billion, showing how competitive the AI sector has become in the region.
Moonshot AI was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked on artificial intelligence projects at Meta and Google.
The company offers subscription plans for its chatbot and licenses its AI technology to enterprise customers.
However, the expansion of Chinese AI companies is also drawing attention from competitors. Bloomberg noted that Anthropic recently accused Moonshot, DeepSeek and MiniMax of extracting outputs from its Claude model to improve their own systems, a technique often referred to as AI distillation.
