--- title: "Kimi completes over $3.5 billion in financing, valuation rises to $35 billion, Pre-IPO round has already started" type: "Topics" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/topics/43033876.md" description: "Kimi has just released the model weights for K3, and Moonshot AI's new round of financing has also been finalized. According to exclusive reports from journalists at the "STAR Market Daily," Moonshot AI has completed its Series F funding round, raising over $3.5 billion with a post-money valuation of $35 billion. This round was not originally planned to raise such a large amount. The report states that due to investor subscription amounts exceeding the original target by more than three times, Moonshot AI closed the Series F early. The Series G funding round, originally scheduled to start in August this year, has also begun ahead of schedule. Series G will be Moonshot AI's Pre-IPO round before its listing..." datetime: "2026-07-29T11:53:45.000Z" locales: - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/43033876.md) - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/43033876.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/43033876.md) author: "[律动BlockBeats](https://longbridge.com/en/profiles/11745700.md)" --- # Kimi completes over $3.5 billion in financing, valuation rises to $35 billion, Pre-IPO round has already started Kimi has just released the model weights for K3, and Moonshot AI's new round of financing has also been finalized. According to exclusive information obtained by reporters from "STAR Market Daily", Moonshot AI has completed its Series F financing, with an amount exceeding $3.5 billion, bringing its post-money valuation to $35 billion. This round of financing was not originally planned to raise such a large amount. Reports indicate that due to subscription amounts from investors exceeding the original target by more than three times, Moonshot AI closed the Series F early. The Series G financing, originally scheduled to start in August this year, has also begun ahead of schedule. Series G will be the Pre-IPO round before Moonshot AI goes public, with a pre-money valuation already rising to $50 billion. A week ago, the version circulating in the market was that Moonshot AI would launch its final private placement round in August after completing a financing round with a pre-money valuation of approximately $31.5 billion. Now, with the final Series F financing exceeding $3.5 billion and a post-money valuation reaching $35 billion, the next round did not wait until August either. Both the capital and the valuation came faster than originally planned. Since its establishment in 2023, Moonshot AI has only taken over three years to push its valuation from $300 million to $35 billion. The ongoing Pre-IPO round has further raised the next price tag to $50 billion. ### **Over ten rounds of financing in three years, valuation rose from $300 million to $35 billion** Moonshot AI was established in April 2023 and was co-founded by Yang Zhilin, Zhang Yutao, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. About two months after the company's establishment, it completed an angel round of financing exceeding $200 million, with a post-money valuation of approximately $300 million. For a large model startup whose product had not yet been officially launched, this was already a rare early-stage financing deal in scale. What truly brought Moonshot AI to the center of the capital table was the completion of its Series A+ financing in February 2024. This round of financing exceeded $1 billion, led by Alibaba, with participation from institutions and industrial capital such as Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, and Meituan. Moonshot AI's valuation was pushed to approximately $2.5 billion. Six months later, the Series B financing exceeded $300 million, and the company's valuation continued to rise to $3.3 billion. However, after the financing round in 2024, Moonshot AI's financing pace slowed down for a while. During this year, significant changes occurred in China's large model market. Tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba continued to lower model prices, while DeepSeek rose rapidly through open-source initiatives and cost efficiency. Competition in general chat products gradually shifted from user growth to model capabilities, inference costs, and commercial revenue. Although Kimi previously gained prominence thanks to its long-text capabilities, relying on just one product label is no longer sufficient to support higher valuations. It wasn't until the end of 2025 that Moonshot AI completed a $500 million Series C financing, reaching a post-money valuation of $4.3 billion. Since then, the company's financing has accelerated significantly. In the first two months of 2026, Moonshot AI continuously completed multiple rounds of financing, with its valuation rising from the previous $4.3 billion to $10 billion, and further to $18 billion. In May this year, the company completed another approximately $2 billion Series D financing, reaching a post-money valuation of $20 billion. Participants were no longer limited to internet companies and market-oriented investment institutions; China Mobile, Guozhitou, CPE Source Peak, and several state-owned background funds also began to enter the shareholder list. Immediately after the completion of Series D, a new round of financing started in June. At that time, the pre-money valuation reported in the market had already reached $31.5 billion. Now, this round concluded with a financing scale exceeding $3.5 billion, raising Moonshot AI's post-money valuation to $35 billion. Looking back at this financing curve, the most obvious change occurred in the past six months. At the end of 2025, Moonshot AI's valuation was still $4.3 billion. More than half a year later, this figure had reached $35 billion, an increase of more than seven times. If the next round is completed according to a pre-money valuation of $50 billion, Moonshot AI's valuation increase over these three-plus years will exceed 160 times. The reasons given by capital are becoming increasingly direct. In the past, investors bet on Yang Zhilin and a Tsinghua-affiliated technical team; now they are betting on whether Moonshot AI can become one of the few Chinese companies remaining at the global frontier model table. ### **After K3, Moonshot AI returns to the center of the table** The timing of the early closure of this financing round coincided exactly with the release of Kimi K3. On July 16, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3. On July 27, the company further opened up the complete model weights, technical reports, and some key infrastructure technologies of K3. K3 is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with a total parameter count of 2.8 trillion and 104 billion parameters activated per inference. It supports a 1-million-token context window and possesses capabilities in vision, programming, reasoning, and long-duration tool calling. In its technical report, Moonshot AI stated that K3 reaches frontier levels in tasks such as long-horizon programming, Agents, knowledge, reasoning, and vision. Its overall capabilities are very close to the strongest closed-source models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. Leaderboards change at any time, and model companies' own tests require a degree of caution. The more important impact of K3 is that it has pushed the boundaries of open-weight model capabilities forward once again. For a long time in the past, open-source models mostly played the role of followers. Closed-source companies were responsible for training the strongest models, and six months or a year later, the open-source community would reproduce parts of those capabilities at a lower cost. K3 changed this time lag. A Chinese company directly released a model with capabilities close to the global frontier, allowing other developers to download, modify, deploy, and continue training their own models based on it. Models certainly did not become cheaper because of this. K3's weight files exceed 1.5 TB; even just loading the complete model requires multiple high-end accelerator cards. Deploying it for production environments may involve high hardware investments. Its "openness" mainly solves whether enterprises can master the model and break free from single API suppliers; it does not mean that everyone can run it on their home computers. Even so, open weights still disrupt the business of closed-source companies. When a sufficiently capable model can be downloaded, enterprises have the opportunity to deploy it on their own servers, keep data internal, customize the model, and avoid forever paying token prices set by a specific company. The barriers built by closed-source models through capability leadership in the past will also be diluted faster. Therefore, after the release of K3, the debate quickly moved beyond technical leaderboards into disputes over policy and commercial interests within the US AI industry. ### **Behind the Open Source vs. Closed Source Debate** On July 24, companies and institutions including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Meta, and Hugging Face publicly supported open-weight models, opposing the US government's rush to restrict AI models available for download and deployment. Anthropic and Amazon were not on the signatory list. The public immediately questioned whether Anthropic hoped to limit the development of open models under the guise of safety and national security, thereby shielding its closed-source business from competitors. On the very day K3's weights were opened, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an article responding to the controversy. He stated that Anthropic never advocated for a complete ban on open-weight models, and that open models lacking dangerous capabilities are a public good that can reduce usage costs and create value for enterprises, developers, and researchers. However, Amodei's core stance has not changed. He continues to advocate for restricting the flow of advanced chips and chip manufacturing equipment to China, cracking down on so-called "industrial-scale model distillation," and requiring models with sufficient capabilities to undergo mandatory safety testing before release, regardless of whether they are open or closed source. This debate, superficially centered on safety, also hides a very practical business issue underneath. Closed-source companies wish to continue controlling the strongest models, charging fees through APIs and subscription services; open models allow capabilities to diffuse to more companies, lowering prices and narrowing the gap between latecomers and leading companies. The faster the openness, the harder it is for a few companies to permanently lock model capabilities within their own servers. K3 comes from China, is large enough in scale, and its capabilities are already close to the frontier. For those supporting open models, K3 proves that the open route can still produce top-tier models; for Anthropic, it also means that the capability advantages established by US companies at huge costs may diffuse out faster. Moonshot AI has thus acquired a type of capital value it did not have before. It is no longer just an AI application company with a large number of Chinese users, nor merely a foundational model startup waiting for its business model to mature. After the release of K3, it has begun to be re-valued within the multiple competitions of global open source versus closed source, the US versus China, and model capabilities versus compute control. The $3.5 billion financing and $35 billion valuation are the answers given by the capital markets. ### Related Stocks - [03690.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/03690.HK.md) - [MPNGY.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/MPNGY.US.md) - [83690.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/83690.HK.md) - [09988.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/09988.HK.md) - [89988.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/89988.HK.md) - [BABA.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABA.US.md) - [00941.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/00941.HK.md) - [BYTED.NA](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BYTED.NA.md) - [600941.CN](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/600941.CN.md) - [80941.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/80941.HK.md) - [KBAB.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/KBAB.US.md) - [BABO.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABO.US.md) - [BABX.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABX.US.md) - [HMTD.SG](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/HMTD.SG.md) - [HBBD.SG](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/HBBD.SG.md) - [HCMD.SG](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/HCMD.SG.md)