Moonshot AI has not even received all the money from its last $20 billion round, but the company behind Kimi is already testing a much higher price.
Bloomberg reported on June 8 that the Beijing startup is discussing a new raise of as much as $2 billion, aiming for a valuation near $30 billion. More than $1 billion of that demand is said to have early investor interest.
Seven times larger in half a year
The pace is the striking part. In December, Moonshot was valued at a little over $4 billion. If the new talks land near $30 billion, the company will have increased its paper value almost sevenfold in roughly six months.
It has raised about $3.9 billion over that period, with backers ranging from Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, ZhenFund, IDG and 5Y Capital to Meituan's investment arm in the most recent $20 billion round.
Why investors are paying attention
The funding pitch is no longer only about China's AI boom. Moonshot's Kimi K2.6, released in April, is described as a trillion-parameter open-source MoE model. It scored 58.6% on SWE-Bench Pro, tied GPT-5.5 on that benchmark, led a tool-using Humanity's Last Exam run at 54.0%, and was priced around 80% below major closed models per million tokens.
That combination matters: a model that is cheap, open and competitive with closed frontier systems can become infrastructure, not just another chatbot. Founder Yang Zhilin argued at the Zhongguancun Forum that new chips should be benchmarked with Kimi or other open models, effectively casting open models as the industry's measuring stick.
Part of a wider capital rotation
Moonshot is not alone. DeepSeek is also closing its first external round at about $7.4 billion, with a post-money valuation reportedly between $52 billion and $59 billion. Together, the two deals show how much more aggressively investors are pricing Chinese open-model companies than they were a year ago.
The risks have not disappeared. Anthropic has publicly accused Moonshot, DeepSeek and MiniMax of training on distilled Claude outputs, a dispute that remains unresolved. Revenue also has to catch up with the valuation. For now, Moonshot is trying to join Zhipu and MiniMax in China's top AI startup tier; in six months, the market will ask whether the usage and revenue can support the number.
Sources：Bloomberg, TechFundingNews and TechCrunch reports on Moonshot AI's latest funding talks；CocoLoop