Moonshot AI's Kimi is considering an IPO in Hong Kong, with a valuation of $18 billion, competing with StepFun for the title of "the first AI stock".
On March 26th, Bloomberg reported that Kimi's parent company, Moonshot AI, is preliminarily considering an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in Hong Kong. It is reported that Moonshot AI has already contacted China International Capital Corporation (CICC) and Goldman Sachs to discuss potential IPO arrangements. According to informed sources, the discussions are still in the early stages, the listing timeline has not been determined, and the IPO may ultimately not proceed. Both Moonshot AI and Goldman Sachs declined to comment, and CICC did not respond to the request.
Founded in April 2023, Moonshot AI is a general-purpose multimodal large model research, development, and application service provider.
In March 2026, according to data released by the global payment platform Stripe, Kimi's individual subscription user payment order volume showed explosive growth in January and February. The number of individual user payment orders increased by 8280% month-on-month in January and rose by another 123.8% month-on-month in February.
On March 14th, according to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Moonshot AI's Kimi valuation has risen to US$18 billion, quadrupling in value within 3 months. A new round of US$1 billion financing (approximately 6.909 billion yuan at the current exchange rate) is also underway.
Also recently, the IPO plans of another AI company, StepFun, are also advancing. StepFun completed a B+ round of financing exceeding 5 billion yuan in early 2026 and announced that Yin Qi would assume the role of Chairman, followed by rapid news of its potential Hong Kong stock market listing.
With the popularity of crayfish, the heat and valuations of large model companies like Moonshot AI and StepFun have soared, benefiting Kimi and StepFun, thereby driving the race to become the "first crayfish stock" in an IPO.
In the early hours of March 18th, at the NVIDIA GTC conference, Moonshot AI's Kimi founder Yang Zhilin delivered a public speech. He stated that to drive continuous breakthroughs in the intelligence ceiling of large models, it is necessary to reconstruct foundational building blocks such as optimizers, attention mechanisms, and residual connections.
In his speech, Yang Zhilin systematically disclosed the technical roadmap behind KimiK2.5 for the first time. He summarized Kimi's evolution logic as the resonance of three dimensions: Token efficiency, long context, and Agent Swarms. "Current scaling is no longer just about piling on resources; it's about finding scale effects simultaneously in computational efficiency, long-term memory, and automated collaboration. If we can multiply the technical gains from these three dimensions, the model will exhibit intelligence levels far beyond the current state." He predicts that future intelligence forms will evolve from single agents to dynamically generated clusters.
According to information from Xiniu Data, Moonshot AI has successively received 5 rounds of financing, with investors including well-known institutions like Sequoia Capital China, ZhenFund, and industrial groups like Tencent Investment, Alibaba, and Xiaohongshu. For more data, please see the chart below, interpreted for you by the Xiniu Foresight AI Assistant.
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