$20 billion.
That is the latest valuation Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, finalized on May 7. The lead investor was an unexpected name: Long-Z Investment, the venture arm of Meituan.
The round brought in $2 billion. Other participants included Tsinghua Holdings, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng Capital. Including earlier rounds, Moonshot has raised $3.9 billion in cash over roughly six months.
The sharper number is the speed of the valuation jump.
| Timing | Valuation |
|---|---|
| End of 2025 | $4.3 billion |
| Early 2026, after the $700 million round | $10 billion |
| May 2026 | $20 billion |
In five months, that is about 4.6 times higher.
Why would Meituan lead a large-model deal?
It is worth pausing on that question.
Meituan’s core business is food delivery and local services, far from foundation models on the surface. But its VC unit has been increasing its exposure to AI over the past six months, and this Long-Z deal is not a one-off. SiliconANGLE identified several of Moonshot’s existing anchor investors: Alibaba, Tencent, Sequoia, ZhenFund, IDG and 5Y, many of which entered early. This round added Meituan, a Tsinghua-linked investor and China Mobile.
China Mobile’s presence is especially notable.
A state-backed telecom operator formally backing a private open-source large-model company is not a routine move. In the United States, Anthropic has taken $5 billion from Amazon and more than $10 billion from Google in a familiar cloud-for-equity and inference-traffic playbook. In China, telecom operators, local state capital and big-tech VC arms are forming a package built around compute, distribution and the path to listing.
The cards in Yang Zhilin’s hand
Moonshot founder Yang Zhilin graduated from Tsinghua University and worked at Meta AI and Google Brain before returning to China in 2023 to start the company. Its first product, Kimi, was a long-context assistant aimed at consumer chat.
The company later made a more strategic move: it open-sourced the model itself.
The latest Kimi K2.6, released a few weeks ago, uses a roughly one-trillion-parameter MoE architecture with 384 experts. SiliconANGLE reported that it is now the second-most-used open-source model on OpenRouter. Moonshot has also released a set of substantial technical components:
- a KV Cache compression approach that moves into latent space
- Kimi-VL, a vision-language model for extracting information from video
- the Muon optimizer for training LLMs above 10 billion parameters
- Kimi Delta Attention for handling one-million-token long context
The revenue story is becoming presentable as well. As of April 2026, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue had passed $200 million, growing across subscriptions and API usage. Among Chinese large-model companies, that puts it in the leading group.
A Hong Kong IPO, after one structural knot
The South China Morning Post reported an important detail: Moonshot’s current parent company is registered in the Cayman Islands, and the company is considering unwinding that VIE structure, moving the main entity back to mainland China and then listing in Hong Kong.
Why go through that work?
Since last year, China’s securities regulator has pushed companies with offshore holding structures to explain why those structures need to remain in place when they list. In plain terms, if the structure can be removed, remove it; if it stays, the company needs a convincing answer.
Why Hong Kong instead of the mainland A-share market? The peer set explains the logic.
| Company | Secondary-market valuation |
|---|---|
| Zhipu AI, already in Hong Kong | $55.5 billion |
| MiniMax, already in Hong Kong | about $33 billion |
| DeepSeek, discussing outside financing | targeting $45 billion |
| Moonshot, pre-IPO | $20 billion |
Against listed or soon-to-be-listed peers, Moonshot’s $20 billion pre-IPO valuation is still roughly half of some comparable benchmarks. SCMP quoted a financial adviser on the round as saying there was “significant upside” in the valuation.
That is why investors were willing to pay around 20 times ARR. They are not only pricing Moonshot today; they are betting on where it can trade after a listing.
What is DeepSeek doing at the same time?
In the same week, DeepSeek was reported to be in contact with external investors at a target valuation of $45 billion. Put together, the two stories start to form a clearer valuation ladder for China’s large-model companies.
The market has narrowed from last year’s “hundred-model war” into a first tier of a few companies. While the U.S. market watches Anthropic and OpenAI race toward the next valuation threshold, China now has its own group of AI leaders with hard numbers attached.
As for what Yang Zhilin actually wants to build, he has said it plainly in several public appearances over the past year: agents that can do real work, the strongest open-source Chinese foundation model, and a sustainable company that can receive a fair Hong Kong market valuation.
After the $20 billion valuation, the first two are already in motion. The third may be next year’s test.
Sources: China's Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B valuation as demand for open source AI skyrockets (TechCrunch); CocoLoop; Open-source AI developer Moonshot AI raises $2B at $20B+ valuation (SiliconANGLE); Kimi developer Moonshot AI valued at US$20b as it navigates China's new IPO rules (South China Morning Post)