- Moonshot AI has raised $2B in a round led by Long-Z Investments, the venture arm of Meituan, China’s dominant food delivery giant.
- The raise pushes Moonshot’s valuation to over $20B, up from $4.3B just six months ago, making it the most well-capitalised private LLM startup in China, ahead of MiniMax and Zhipu AI on total funding raised.
- Kimi K2.6 is now the second most-used LLM on OpenRouter globally, while rival DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise at a $45B valuation.
Moonshot AI, based in Beijing, raised about $2 billion in a funding round led by Long-Z Investments, Meituan’s venture arm, which is one of the country’s most powerful consumer tech platforms, reports Bloomberg.
Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng also joined in. This is the largest single funding event in China’s large language model sector, making Moonshot the best-funded AI lab in the country.
At the end of 2025, Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion. By early 2026, its value had more than doubled to $10 billion following a $700 million raise. With the latest round, the company has raised $3.9 billion in six months, keeping pace with top Western AI firms.
Moonshot was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, who previously worked at Meta AI and Google Brain and taught at Tsinghua University. The company develops the Kimi series of open-weight large language models.
Earlier this year, Kimi K2.5 gained attention for performing nearly as well as OpenAI and Anthropic‘s models in coding benchmarks. Its next version, Kimi K2.6, is now the second most-used LLM on OpenRouter, a platform that tracks real-world usage across the industry.
Moonshot’s Kimi models go head-to-head with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Chinese rivals like ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu’s Z.ai, and DeepSeek, which is reportedly seeking outside funding at a $45 billion valuation.
The fresh capital will go toward accelerating model development and expanding its enterprise go-to-market push.