Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI was founded in Beijing on March 1, 2023, by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin, all alumni of Tsinghua University. The company's name and Chinese name, 月之暗面, were inspired by Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, released exactly 50 years before the company's launch. Yang Zhilin, who had research stints at Google and Meta and co-founded Recurrent AI, brought together a core team of engineers from Google, Meta, and leading Chinese tech firms, many of whom had contributed to Transformer-XL and XLNet.

The company's flagship product, the Kimi chatbot, launched in October 2023 and quickly became a strong competitor to Baidu's Ernie Bot. Kimi initially offered a 200,000-character context window, which was upgraded to 2 million Chinese characters in March 2024. By June 2024, Kimi had reached 10 million monthly active users. Moonshot AI has since expanded its product line to include Kimi Researcher, Kimi Agent, Kimi Code, Kimi Audio, Kimina Prover, and the open-weight Kimi K2 model released in July 2025.

Moonshot AI has been dubbed one of China's AI Tiger companies by investors. Its valuation grew from $2.5 billion in February 2024 to over $20 billion by April 2026, following a $2 billion funding round led by Meituan's VC arm. As of April 2026, annual recurring revenue exceeded $200 million. The company is considering an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. [edit]