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Chinese start-up Moonshot AI raises US$1 billion in funding round led by Alibaba and VC HongShan amid strong interest for OpenAI-type firms
- Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, was valued at about US$2.5 billion in its latest funding round
- The start-up in October launched smart chatbot Kimi Chat, built on its self-developed Moonshot large language model
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Ben Jiangin Beijing
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI has raised more than US$1 billion in a new funding round led by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and venture capital firm HongShan, as interest among investors remains high for innovative mainland enterprises similar to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, was valued at about US$2.5 billion in its latest funding round, according to separate reports published on Monday by local media 36Kr and LatePost. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
HongShan, the Chinese spin-off of US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, and angel investor ZhenFund were involved in Moonshot AI’s seed funding last June, according to market intelligence platform PitchBook.
The start-up in October launched smart chatbot Kimi Chat, built on its self-developed Moonshot large language model (LLM), which can process as many as 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window – referring to the swathe of text that an AI model can process during conversation with users.
Alibaba, HongShan and Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Moonshot AI’s new funding round marked the largest single financing raised by a Chinese AI start-up since ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
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