Kimi

Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2023, and one of China's most prominent AI startups. Its flagship consumer product is Kimi, a chat assistant that gained recognition for its long-context capabilities. The company has attracted major backers including Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, and IDG Capital.

Moonshot AI's funding scaled rapidly in 2025-2026: it raised roughly $500 million at a $4.3 billion valuation in late 2025, then later closed a round reportedly valuing it near $20 billion (a Meituan-affiliated Long-Z Investments-led round in 2026), reflecting surging demand for its open-weight models. Kimi K2's open-weight releases positioned Moonshot as a leading open-model lab.

Kimi centers on a chat interface (web and mobile) capable of ingesting very long inputs, letting users analyze large documents, codebases, and research collections in a single conversation. It supports coding, writing, translation, multilingual use, web search, and deeper reasoning and research/agent modes. Files can be uploaded as input, and outputs include text and code.

For developers, Moonshot AI offers an OpenAI-compatible API to the Kimi K2 model family, priced by token usage with context caching and batch discounts. Because Kimi K2 weights are published on Hugging Face, teams can also self-host or fine-tune the models. This dual model, free consumer chat plus affordable API and open weights, is central to Kimi's positioning.

Kimi serves a broad audience: everyday users wanting a free, capable chat assistant; students, researchers, and analysts who need long-document analysis; and developers seeking affordable long-context LLM access via API or self-hosted open weights. It is especially attractive to cost-sensitive builders and the open-source AI community, while being less suited to enterprises with strict data-residency requirements or needs for polished English-first enterprise support and collaboration tooling.

Moonshot AI raised approximately $500 million at a $4.3 billion valuation in late 2025 (Series C led by IDG Capital, with Alibaba and Tencent participating), and subsequently closed a larger round in 2026 reportedly valuing the company at around $20 billion, led by Meituan's Long-Z Investments with participants including China Mobile and Tsinghua Capital. Backers include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, and IDG Capital.