Moonshot AI
privateMoonshot AI (named after the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon) is one of China's "AI Tigers" and its fastest-ever decacorn, founded in March 2023 by three Tsinghua classmates. CEO Yang Zhilin earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in under four years, co-authoring the highly influential Transformer-XL and XLNet papers while working with Google Brain and Meta FAIR.
Moonshot has raised over $3.9B across multiple rounds from HongShan (Sequoia China), Alibaba, Tencent, and others, reaching a $20B valuation in May 2026 in a ~$2B round led by Meituan's venture arm Long-Z Investments (formerly DragonBall / Longzhu Capital, 龙珠资本), with participation from China Mobile and CITIC Private Equity. Its consumer product Kimi pioneered long-context processing in Chinese AI, supporting 2M-token inputs. ARR surpassed $100M in early March and exceeded $200M by April 2026 following the Kimi K2.5 launch.
In 2025, Moonshot shifted from proprietary to open-weight releases. Kimi-K2 (1T MoE, 32B active) was called "another DeepSeek moment" by Nature. The team has also contributed influential infrastructure including the Muon optimizer (2x more efficient than AdamW), MoBA (Mixture of Block Attention), and Mooncake (KVCache-centric serving, Best Paper at FAST 2025).
People
- Yang Zhilin OpenReview — Founder & CEO (formerly CMU PhD; Google Brain; Meta FAIR; Recurrent AI)
- Zhou Xinyu OpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Hulu; Tencent)
- Wu Yuxin — Co-founder (formerly Google Brain; Meta AI Research)
- Jianlin Su OpenReviewBlog (CN)Blog (EN) — Core Researcher (creator of RoPE)
- Flood Sung OpenReview — Former RL Lead (departed 2025) (formerly Founded XVI Robotics)
News
- 2026-05-07 Kimi Chatbot Maker Moonshot AI Valued at $20 Billion in Meituan-Led Round — Bloomberg
- 2026-04-01 Moonshot AI Raising $1B at $18B Valuation; Working with CICC and Goldman Sachs on HK IPO — Bloomberg
- 2026-03-26 China's Moonshot AI Seeks Listing in Hong Kong Under Heightened Scrutiny — WSJ