Founded only a year ago, China’s notable AI startup Moonshot has already managed to reach a total valuation of $2.3 billion following a successful Series B funding with significant investors. According to Chinese online media outlet LatePost, Moonshot AI has raised over $1 billion thanks to investments from major Chinese companies including Alibaba Meituan, Xiaohongshu, and Sequoia China.

Following the international surge of interest ignited by ChatGPT, this represents the most substantial single-round investment received by a large-scale AI model company within the country to date.

Moonshot AI’s last financing round took place in 2023 and was valued at $200 million. This was in partnership with investors including Sequoia China and ZhenFund.

The investment round attracted participation from industry giants such as Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, and Alibaba, each a leader in its domain. This support not only secures the financial foundation for Moonshot AI but also hints at future collaborative opportunities in data sharing, distribution channels, and practical applications. Such partnerships are poised to benefit the company’s product deployment and broaden its market reach.

Established in April 2023, Moonshot AI is led by CEO Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University Department of Computer Science and Technology alum and protégé of Professor Tang Jie.

Embarking on his second venture, Yang founded Recurrent.ai in 2016 amidst his Ph.D. studies, concentrating on the application of AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, multimodal communication, and expansive models for developing solutions in sales technology. It’s understood that Recurrent.ai has developed an extensive collection of semantic models from numerous sectors.

With the ambition of advancing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), Yang and his initial team from Recurrent.ai initiated Moonshot AI in 2023.

Within a year of its inception, Moonshot AI has successfully trained a proprietary large-scale model, boasting a capacity of hundreds of billions of parameters.

Moonshot introduced its first Large Language Model (LLM) in October 2023 and released a chatbot based on it called Kimi Chat. This AI model had the unique ability to expand its context length. This intelligent assistant is designed to process inputs of ultra-long texts, accommodating up to 200,000 Chinese characters.

By November, Kimi Chat had expanded its availability to all users, moving beyond its initial beta-testing phase.

Image Credit: Pandaily