Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, confidentially submitted an A1 filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week, formally putting a Hong Kong IPO on the calendar. Its public line is that it "does not comment on market rumors" and "has nothing to disclose at this time." At the same moment it filed, the company was also negotiating a new funding round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, which several people close to the deal expect to be its last round before listing.
Confidential filing is a permitted route on the Hong Kong exchange: the A1 document isn't posted online or made public, and outsiders can only pick up signals from bankers and investors. The path gives an issuer room to maneuver — it can sit on the filing if sentiment turns sour, or move straight to a public hearing once the window looks right. In early August, Moonshot had publicly denied rumors that it was preparing to file. Less than a month later, the filing was done.
A $15 billion jump in valuation in barely a month
Moonshot closed an F round of more than $3.5 billion this July at a post-money valuation of $35 billion; that round was oversubscribed by more than three times its original target and closed early. Before that, at the end of 2025, its valuation sat around $4.3 billion. In a little over half a year, the number has risen roughly eightfold. The $50 billion figure now on the table is a pre-money number — once the new capital lands, the valuation on paper will be higher still.
What's backing that curve is the pace of releases. Between January and July this year, Kimi shipped K2.5, K2.6 and K3 in succession — roughly one generation every three months. After K3 launched, the company reported annualized recurring revenue of $300 million. Benchmark results have been uneven: K3 scaled parameters up to 2.8 trillion, yet it trailed on specialized tests such as cyber offense-and-defense evaluations. For a company preparing for public markets, volatility on the leaderboards is harder to manage than the absolute scores — public-market analysts will ask about the latest round of benchmarks every single quarter.
$300 million in revenue against a $50 billion valuation
Do the rough math: $300 million in annualized recurring revenue against a $50 billion pre-money valuation works out to a price-to-sales ratio of roughly 160x. That multiple would be indefensible for a mature software company, but it isn't out of line for a Chinese large-model company today — peers in this space aren't priced off revenue, they're priced off compute reserves, model rankings and the ability to win enterprise deals.
The revenue mix itself is shifting too. One of Moonshot's bargaining chips in recent talks has been pushing cloud providers to share a cut of revenue generated by API calls to Kimi K3, reportedly asking for as much as 30%. Once agreements like that are signed, revenue stops being purely API and subscription income — cloud-side revenue sharing would push the curve onto a different slope. Whether Hong Kong investors are willing to pay up front for a curve that hasn't yet proven itself is the first question this offering has to answer. There's little mystery about where the proceeds will go: the bulk will be spent on compute and electricity.
The ones ahead in line have already cashed in
Hong Kong's market has been unusually kind to AI companies this year. MiniMax has gained more than 470% since listing, Zhipu AI is up 570%, and trading volume hasn't tapered off either. That wealth effect travels backward through the pipeline: early shareholders become more willing to let a company delay listing in exchange for a higher valuation, and more willing to put additional money into a pre-IPO round. Moonshot's shareholder roster includes Meituan and Tencent as strategic investors; IDG Capital, HSG and ZhenFund as financial investors; and China Mobile along with the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund representing state capital — a mix that happens to be exactly what Hong Kong underwriters like to see.
There's more of a queue behind Moonshot, too. The market widely expects DeepSeek to kick off its own listing process in the first half of next year, and if it also chooses Hong Kong, the two offering windows would land close together. Whoever files first typically gets more room to negotiate pricing. The line isn't limited to Chinese companies, either — Anthropic has already filed for a listing, and OpenAI has confidentially submitted an S-1, with both eyeing a listing timeline around 2027. The world's most richly valued model companies are converging on public markets in the same stretch of time, and behind that convergence is one shared reality: the size of a single private-market check has peaked, while compute spending keeps climbing.
The road after a confidential filing is still a long one — hearings, roadshows, bookbuilding — and any step of it can stall if market sentiment turns. How urgently Moonshot needs to push through mostly hinges on when its new funding round closes: once that money is in hand, the pressure to list drops a notch; if the round falls through, the Hong Kong path will have to move that much faster.
Sources: 21st Century Business Herald, HK01, CocoLoop, IT Home; valuation, funding amount and shareholder details cross-checked against each outlet's public reporting, and the price-to-sales ratio is a rough estimate based on $300 million in annualized recurring revenue.