Moonshot AI, a Beijing, China-based AI startup, has raised more than $1 billion in new funding. The startup is valued at approximately US$2.5 billion.
SaaS Investors
The round was led by Alibaba Group Holding and HongShan, a Chinese spin-off of Sequoia Capital.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited, or Alibaba, is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology.
HongShan is a Chinese venture capital firm founded in 2005. It was previously the China investment arm of Sequoia Capital (Sequoia). The firm seeks to invest in agriculture, distribution, B2B, education, retail, energy, financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors.
About Moonshot
Founded by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon University graduate, Moonshot AI focuses on processing long texts, a critical aspect of AI model development. The company offers various technological solutions. The company develops a new generation of general multimodal large models and builds consumer-side super applications on this basis. In October, Moonshot AI launched the smart chatbot Kimi Chat, built on its self-developed Moonshot large language model (LLM), which can process as many as 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window - referring to the swathe of text that an AI model can process during a conversation with users. It was founded in 2023 and is based in Beijing, China.
Funding Details
Company: Moonshot AI Ltd.
Raised: $1.0B +
Round: Unknown
Funding Month: February 2024
Lead Investors: Alibaba Group Holding and HongShan
Company Website: https://www.moonshot.cn/
Software Category: Multimodal Large Models
Source: https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3252574/chinese-start-moonshot-ai-raises-us1-billion-funding-round-led-alibaba-and-vc-hongshan-amid-strong