Moonshot AI Hits $35 Billion Valuation on Kimi K3 Momentum

13:00 · July 29, 2026

Moonshot AI’s latest funding round closed well ahead of expectations, with the Beijing-based startup pulling in $3.5 billion against an original target of just $1 billion to $2 billion, pushing its valuation to $35 billion. The surge in investor demand tracks closely with the reception to Kimi K3, the company’s 2.8 trillion parameter open-weight model released this week, which has drawn comparisons to leading proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI on several benchmarks. Among the lead investors was China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, a state-backed vehicle that has also invested in rival lab DeepSeek, signaling continued government appetite for backing domestic frontier AI champions. Moonshot is not stopping there. The company is already lining up a further funding round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation as it prepares for a planned initial public offering in Hong Kong later this year, and people close to the company say it has been expediting its fundraising timeline specifically to capitalize on the attention Kimi K3 has generated. The back-to-back model release and valuation jump mark Moonshot as one of the fastest-growing challengers to the dominant U.S. labs.