Moonshot AI Completes Over $3.5 Billion Series F, Valuation Hits $35 Billion, Series G Pre-IPO at $50 Billion

Moonshot AI has completed its Series F financing, with an amount exceeding $3.5 billion and a post-money valuation of $35 billion. Because the actual fundraising amount exceeded the original target by more than three times, the round closed early. The Series G (pre-IPO) round, originally scheduled to launch in August, has been brought forward, with a pre-money valuation of $50 billion. Moonshot AI has begun contacting potential investors and plans to complete this round in 2026, followed by a listing in Hong Kong.

On July 29, Moonshot AI completed its business registration change, converting its entity type from a limited liability company to a joint-stock company and changing its name to Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co. , Ltd. At the management level, founder Yang Zhilin changed from director to chairman and general manager, with Zhang Yutong added as a director and Song Sijia as finance head.

Moonshot AI's fundraising pace in 2026 has accelerated significantly. Early in the year, the company pushed its valuation from $10 billion to $18 billion through three rounds. In May, it completed a $2 billion round led by Meituan Dragon Ball, at a post-money valuation of $20 billion. After a Series E round in June, the Series F round in July raised over $3.5 billion. The company's valuation has grown from $4.3 billion after its Series C in December 2025 to the current pre-IPO pre-money valuation of $50 billion, an increase of more than 10 times. As of June 2026, Moonshot AI's annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeded $300 million, with API revenue accounting for over 70%.

On July 16, Moonshot AI released its new generation flagship large model, Kimi K3. The model has a total parameter count of 2.8 trillion, adopts a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with 896 routing experts, of which only 16 are activated per token, resulting in 104 billion activated parameters. It supports a 1 million token context window and has native visual understanding capabilities. K3 is the largest open-source model by parameter count globally. On July 27, Moonshot AI fully open-sourced the Kimi K3 model weights, simultaneously releasing a technical report and training toolchains including MoonEP, FlashKDA, and AgentEnv. After open-sourcing, K3 quickly topped the Hugging Face global trends chart, setting the fastest growth record since the platform's founding.

K3 performed strongly in several benchmark tests. It ranked second in the AA-Briefcase long-cycle knowledge work test, first in the Arena front-end development leaderboard, and scored 91.1 in the OmniDocBench test. Moonshot AI stated that K3's overall performance still lags behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, but the gap has narrowed on key evaluation metrics. The single-task running cost of K3 is approximately $0.94, lower than the $1.80 for Claude Opus 4.8.

After the release of K3, the US AI stock sector experienced volatility. Nvidia's market capitalization lost $111.1 billion on the first trading day after the release, and lost another $250 billion after the open-sourcing, with the US AI sector wiping out a total of $470 billion in 72 hours. Elon Musk commented on social media that K3 was "impressive" and listed it as a benchmark model for Grok 4.5. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy accused Moonshot AI of developing K3 through "distillation" of US models, and the Treasury secretary threatened to impose sanctions, but the Commerce secretary stated that the White House has not yet unified its position. In the tech community, Jensen Huang shared an open letter signed by 25 institutions supporting open-source model development; by July 28, the number of signatory institutions had expanded to 133. Chinese open-source model downloads account for 41% of the global total.

In 2026, fundraising activity in China's large-model industry remained strong. DeepSeek completed its first funding round of approximately RMB 50 billion in June, at a post-money valuation of $52 billion, and in July began a new round at a pre-money valuation of $71 billion. Zhipu and MiniMax have listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but their share prices have experienced significant pullbacks. Moonshot AI was founded in April 2023, with legal representative Yang Zhilin and core product Kimi. Its shareholders include Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, and other internet companies as well as multiple investment institutions.