Chinese AI firm Moonshot is reportedly seeking a $50 billion valuation in a new fundraising round – days after the release of its powerful Kimi K3 model sparked chatter that China was catching up to US giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Beijing-based firm is looking to secure the funds before going public in Hong Kong, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The initial public offering could take place later this year.
Moonshot is on track to close a financing round at a $31.5 billion valuation that has been underway since earlier this summer, according to the report.
From there, the firm plans to immediately seek additional funds at the $50 billion violation ahead of its IPO.
The company – founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin – drew global attention with the launch of Kimi K3.
The large-language model was trained on 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-source model ever released.
Moonshot did not immediately return a request for comment.
Yang, 33, formerly worked at Meta and Google.
Benchmark tests showed Kimi K3 outperforming Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 on most coding tasks, though it is still less powerful that Anthropic’s cutting-edge Fable model.
Earlier this week, Moonshot said it would temporarily pause new subscriptions for the model after experiencing “unprecedented compute challenges” and would instead focus on serving existing paid customers for the time being.
US officials have fretted about the increasing popularity of open-source Chinese AI models, which are freely available to download and much cheaper than closed-sourced models offered by Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs.
The trend has only increased tensions in the US-China AI race.
Anthropic publicly accused Moonshot of ripping off its technology in a February blog post.
Antropic currently has a $965 billion valuation and is planning to go public later this year.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI has an $852 billion valuation and has also announced plans to go public, though some reports say its debut could be delayed until 2027.