Moonshot AI secures another $2 billion in funding, valuing over $20 billion and becoming China's most highly funded large model company

On May 6, LatePost reported that Kimi's parent company, Dark Side of the Moon, is close to closing a new $2 billion round offinancing, the post-investment valuation exceeded 20 billion U.S. dollars. This round is led by the Dragon Pearl of the United States (contributed more than 200 million dollars), China Mobile, CPE (CITIC Industrial Fund) and other participants.

If successfully completed, the dark side of the moon in less than half a year the total amount of financing will be more than 3.9 billion U.S. dollars, cumulative financing of more than 37.6 billion yuan, to become the most cumulative financing in the domestic large model startups.

Dark Side of the Moon was founded in April 2023, and its founder, Shik-Lin Yang, is a Tsinghua undergraduate and Carnegie Mellon PhD, who has worked on big model research at Google Brain and Meta AI.

Two months after its founding, the company closed an angel round of nearly 2 billion RMB (Sequoia China, Zhenge Fund, etc.), and a month later closed a Series A round of financing (Meituan Longzhu and others stepped up).2023 In October 2023, the company launched Kimi Chat, which supports 200,000 Chinese character inputs.

In February 2024, Dark Side of the Moon completed a $1 billion financing at a valuation of $2.5 billion (Ali, Sequoia, Xiaohongshu, etc.); the B round in August of the same year received another more than $300 million (Tencent, Ali co-investment) at a valuation of $3.3 billion.

At that time, the dark side of the moon and the wisdom of the spectrum, MiniMax, step leap star, Baichuan, zero one million things and called “AI six little dragons”.

However, in early 2025, the “DeepSeek moment” broke the original pattern. The Dark Side of the Moon released K1.5 sound volume at the same time was suppressed, DeepSeek also reconstructed the logic of base model valuation - investors re-discussed whether the base model companies will be squeezed by the big players.

Since February 2025, the dark side of the moon has significantly contracted the investment flow budget, suspended a number of Android channel cooperation, and experienced a 16-month financing window. During the same period of time, the industry has adjusted its route: Zero-One Everything and Baichuan reduced the base training to small models and industry solutions; Smart Spectrum promoted GLM open source and focused on government and enterprises; MiniMax strengthened the B-end and weakened the “super APP” narrative.

The Dark Side of the Moon chose to shrink the investment flow and focus resources on modeling capabilities: investing in K2 trillion parameter large model research and development, and upgrading medical, legal and other vertical scenarios, looking for cash flow through member subscription, API commercialization. 2025 July K2 launched after the market feedback warmed up; at the end of the year, oversubscribed to complete the $500 million round of Series C financing, the valuation of about $4.3 billion, the book cash of more than 10 billion yuan, and basically get out of the doldrums. .

The real valuation leap on the Dark Side of the Moon occurs in 2026.

In January and February, the company intensively completed three rounds of financing (500 million, 700 million, 700 million U.S. dollars), plus the current round of 2 billion U.S. dollars, less than six months to raise more than 3.9 billion U.S. dollars, the valuation of more than four times compared with last year's November. The dark side of the moon has become one of the most sought-after capital in the current domestic AI startups by virtue of its ability to raise funds in the primary market.

Behind the valuation repair of Dark Side of the Moon is the resonance of multiple factors: Smart Spectrum and MiniMax promote listing to re-open the window of capital attention; K2 and K2.5 iteration strengthens the perception of product power; OpenClaw ecology drives the heating up of Agent narrative, and products such as Kimi Claw lower the threshold for ordinary users to use smart bodies, pushing up its attention in the C-suite and developer groups.

However, a high valuation also means higher pressure: Kimi Claw's first-mover advantage may still be affected by Tencent and other big players; its cloud-based smart body products are facing controversy over security and user trust; and model training, reasoning and graphics card reserves will continue to consume huge amounts of money.

Yang Zhilin previously said the financing would be used to “aggressively scale up graphics cards” and accelerate the development of next-generation models - implying that the company is still in a cycle of high investment, high consumption, and high uncertainty.

Founded three years ago, Dark Side of the Moon has grown from a long text startup to a large model unicorn with the highest financing scale in China. The real test at present is no longer just whether it can continue to raise funds, but whether it can precipitate the capital heat into a stable product capability, commercial revenue and ecological position. Valuation can be doubled in a few months, but the long-term value of an AI company is still to be proved by technology iteration, user retention and commercialization efficiency together.