Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has closed its final private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, clearing the way for a Hong Kong public listing in the first quarter of 2027, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Beijing-based lab, best known for its Kimi chatbot and open-weight models, has begun preparing to gauge investor interest, with informal early-look meetings with institutional investors expected to start as early as this month.
The company is considering raising up to $5 billion through the offering, though the timing and size could still change, according to the report.
If it proceeds, the listing would be the biggest market test yet of whether an open-weights Chinese AI lab can fund expensive frontier-model training through public equity markets rather than the balance sheet of a tech giant.
A 59% valuation jump in one summer
Moonshot's valuation has climbed relentlessly through its financing rounds. The company was valued at $31.5 billion in a round this summer, meaning the latest round represents a jump of roughly 59 percent in just a matter of months, according to the report.
The surge follows the July release of Kimi K3, an open-weights model that drew global attention by matching or approaching the performance of leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic on several benchmarks, including coding and agentic tasks, at a significantly lower cost.
Moonshot was founded in early 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University graduate who previously worked at Meta AI and Google Brain. Its backers include Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, along with 5Y Capital.
Unlike Alibaba's Qwen or ByteDance's Doubao, which sit inside parent-company balance sheets, Moonshot has to pay for its frontier training runs through the equity markets.
Revenue is finally catching up
The valuation now has a revenue story behind it. Moonshot's annual recurring revenue climbed from $300 million in June to about $1 billion currently, and the company expects it to reach $2 billion by December, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company has already filed a confidential listing application with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Bank of America is acting as overall coordinator on the deal, with China International Capital Corp, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs serving as sponsor banks, Bloomberg reported.
A crowded runway to the public markets
Moonshot would follow rivals Zhipu and MiniMax, which listed in Hong Kong in January. MiniMax's shares more than doubled on their first day of trading, setting a bullish precedent for AI lab listings in the city.
The same Bloomberg reporting said DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based lab that became a global phenomenon in early 2025, is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, in its own funding round backed by Tencent and battery maker CATL, after investor demand pushed it well past its original target.
There are clouds, however. The Information has reported that Chinese regulators opened a data-security investigation into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, and it is not yet clear whether tighter oversight could affect the valuation or the IPO timeline.
OpenAI has also accused Moonshot of attempting to extract hidden model reasoning, claims the company has not publicly addressed in detail.
Still, the signal is hard to ignore: a three-year-old open-weights lab may soon be China's most valuable AI company on public markets, and investors are lining up for an early look.
By Hamza Faisal
