Moonshot AI Attracts Over \$1 Billion in Funding

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI has secured more than $1 billion in a new funding round. The round was led by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and venture capital firm HongShan. The move reflects continued investor interest in innovative mainland enterprises similar to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Beijing-based Moonshot AI Valued at $2.5 Billion

Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, is now valued at approximately $2.5 billion, as per reports by local media outlets 36Kr and LatePost. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post. HongShan, the Chinese spin-off of the US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, and angel investor ZhenFund participated in Moonshot AI’s seed funding in June, as reported by market intelligence platform PitchBook.

Innovative Chatbot Kimi Chat

In October, the start-up introduced Kimi Chat, an intelligent chatbot built on its in-house developed Moonshot large language model (LLM). This AI model can process up to 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window, which refers to the volume of text the AI model can handle during a conversation with users.

Unprecedented Funding for Chinese AI Start-up

This latest financing round for Moonshot AI is the largest single funding obtained by a Chinese AI start-up since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. This recent investment indicates that generative AI start-ups continue to attract strong interest in mainland China. According to a report by AI-focused research firm Zhidongxi, China led the global investment into such firms in the first half of 2023.

China had the highest number of funded generative AI start-ups, accounting for 22 out of the 51 worldwide that received approximately $13.8 billion in investments during the same period.