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| Moonshot AI | |
|---|---|
| 北京月之暗面科技有限公司 | |
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| File:Moonshot AI Headquarters.jpg | |
| Moonshot AI headquarters in Beijing | |
| Type | Private company |
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | March 2023 |
| Founders | Yang Zhilin (CEO) Zhou Xinyu Wu Yuxin |
| Headquarters | 13th Floor, Building 1, JD Technology Building No. 76 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China |
| Key people | Yang Zhilin (CEO) Zhou Xinyu (Co-founder) Wu Yuxin (Co-founder) Zhang Yutao (Product Development)
|
| Products | Kimi AI assistant Kimi K2 model Kimi K1.5 model Mooncake platform Kimi Slides Moonlight models Ohai (social AI app) Noisee (audio generation tool)
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| Valuation | $3.3 billion (August 2024) |
| Employees | ~300 (2025) |
| Website | moonshot.cn |
Moonshot AI (Chinese: 月之暗面; pinyin: Yuè Zhī Ànmiàn, literally "Dark Side of the Moon"; legal name: Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese artificial intelligence company headquartered in Beijing, founded in March 2023. The company specializes in developing large language models (LLMs) and aims to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) through foundational models with capabilities in long context processing, multimodal world modeling, and scalable architectures for self-improvement.[1] Moonshot AI has been dubbed one of China's "AI Tigers" or as part of the "Six Tigers" by investors, alongside companies like Zhipu AI, MiniMax, 01.AI, Baichuan AI, and DeepSeek.[2] The company is best known for its Kimi chatbot and the open-source Kimi K2 model, which features advanced long-context processing capabilities.
Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin, all alumni of Tsinghua University, amid a surge in interest in generative AI following the success of ChatGPT.[3] The company was launched on the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, which was founder Yang Zhilin's favorite album and the inspiration for the company's Chinese name.[1] The English name "Moonshot" reflects the ambitious and difficult nature of the company's mission, described by Yang as "like landing on the moon."[4]
Yang Zhilin stated that his goal for founding Moonshot AI was to build foundational models to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), with three key milestones: long context length, multimodal world model, and a scalable general architecture capable of continuous self-improvement without human input.[1]
In October 2023, Moonshot launched its first product, the Kimi chatbot, to the public. The chatbot initially could process up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation, making it the world's first AI assistant with such extensive context-handling capabilities.[3]
By March 2024, Moonshot claimed Kimi could handle 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, a significant upgrade from the previous version.[5] The chatbot emerged as the closest rival to Baidu's Ernie Bot in the Chinese market. Due to increased user demand following this upgrade, Kimi suffered a two-day outage on March 21, 2024, prompting a public apology from the company.[1]
On January 20, 2025, Kimi K1.5 was released, which Moonshot claimed matched the performance of OpenAI's o1 model in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning capabilities.[6]
In July 2025, Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K2, a large language model with 1 trillion total parameters using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released under a modified MIT License.[7]
On September 9, 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905, which increased performance in agentic coding tasks and doubled the context window to 256K tokens.[8]
Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) serves as CEO and co-founder. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and graduated from Tsinghua University, where he ranked first in his class at the Computer Science Department.[3] Before founding Moonshot AI, Yang worked at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI) and Google Brain, where he co-authored influential papers including Transformer-XL and XLNet.[3] He also worked with Huawei Technologies on an early version of the Pangu AI model in 2020 and led a team to develop the Wudao LLM at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in 2021.[3]
Zhou Xinyu (周昕宇) is a co-founder who previously worked at Hulu, Tencent, and Megvii, conducting research in deploying deep neural networks on hardware with limited computational resources.[9]
Wu Yuxin (吴育昕) is a co-founder who previously worked at Google Brain on foundation models and at Meta AI Research on computer vision.[9]
In October 2023, Moonshot launched its first AI chatbot, Kimi, whose name comes from Yang's English nickname.[1] The chatbot initially could process up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation, making it the world's first AI assistant with such extensive context-handling capabilities.[3]
By March 2024, Moonshot claimed Kimi could handle 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, a significant upgrade from the previous version.[1] This allows the chatbot to analyze and summarize the content of lengthy documents, such as academic papers, financial reports, or entire books, in a single query. For comparison, 2 million Chinese characters is roughly equivalent to the text of several novels.[5]
In China, Kimi offers six tiers of subscription plans ranging from 5.2 yuan for four days to 399 yuan for a year of priority access.[10]
In July 2025, Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K2, a large language model with 1 trillion total parameters using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, where 32 billion parameters are active during inference.[11] The model was trained on 15.5 trillion tokens of data and is released under a modified MIT License.[1]
Key features of Kimi K2 include:
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Total Parameters | 1 trillion |
| Active Parameters | 32 billion |
| Architecture | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 384 experts |
| Training Data | 15.5 trillion tokens |
| Context Window | 128K tokens (256K in K2-Instruct-0905) |
| License | Modified MIT License |
The model achieved state-of-the-art performance among open-source non-thinking models, with notable scores including:[12]
| Model ! Release Date ! Key Features ! Parameters |
|---|
| Kimi (initial) | October 2023 | 200,000 Chinese characters context | N/A |
| Kimi (upgraded) | March 2024 | 2 million Chinese characters context | N/A |
| Kimi K1.5 | January 20, 2025 | Matches OpenAI o1 in math, coding, multimodal; 128K context | N/A |
| Kimi K2 | July 2025 | MoE architecture, agentic coding, open-source (modified MIT) | 1 trillion (32 billion active) |
| Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 | September 9, 2025 | Improved coding, 256K context | 1 trillion |
| Kimi-VL | 2025 | Multimodal capabilities | N/A |
| Kimi-Dev-72B | 2025 | Development-focused model | 72 billion |
Mooncake is the serving platform for Moonshot's Kimi chatbot, processing over 100 billion tokens daily.[1] It features a KVCache-centric disaggregated architecture that separates prefill and decoding clusters, utilizing underused CPU, DRAM, SSD, and NIC resources of GPU clusters.[13]
Moonshot was awarded the Erik Riedel Best Paper Award at the USENIX FAST conference in February 2025 for the paper detailing Mooncake's architecture.[14] In practical deployments, Mooncake enabled Kimi to handle 115% and 107% more requests on NVIDIA A800 and H800 clusters, respectively, compared to previous systems.[13]
Key components of Mooncake include:
The platform's code has been partially open-sourced on GitHub.[15]
In 2025, Moonshot AI launched Kimi Slides, an AI agent within the Kimi ecosystem that generates professional presentations from text prompts, documents, or website URLs.[16] The tool is part of Kimi+, Moonshot AI's premium version of the chatbot, though it was initially offered for free to all users.[16]
In late 2025, Moonshot AI introduced "OK Computer," an agent mode for Kimi that can create multi-page websites and editable slides from simple prompts. The feature supports processing up to 1 million rows of input data and multimedia outputs including text, audio, and video.[17] The name "OK Computer" is a reference to the 1997 album by Radiohead.[18]
Moonshot AI provides an open platform for developers via its API service at platform.moonshot.ai. This includes access to models like Kimi K1.5, which features a 128K context window, function calling, and vision support. Pricing starts at $0.004 per 1K input tokens and $0.006 per 1K output tokens, with a free tier of 1 million tokens monthly.[19]
Moonshot AI has raised significant capital since its inception, establishing it as one of the most valuable AI startups in China.
| Date ! Round ! Amount Raised ! Lead Investors ! Post-Money Valuation ! Ref |
|---|
| Seed | $60 million | N/A | $300 million | [1] |
| Series A | > $300 million | HongShan (formerly Sequoia Capital China), Zhen Fund | Not specified | [20] |
| Series B | $1 billion | Alibaba Group, HongShan, Monolith Management, Xiaomi, Tom Preston-Werner | $2.5 billion | [21][22] |
| Series B Extension | $300 million | Tencent, Gaorong Capital | $3.3 billion | [23] |
The company has raised approximately $1.36 billion in total funding by late 2024.[24] The February 2024 round was the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record at the time.[21]
In collaboration with UCLA, Moonshot AI researchers published "Muon is Scalable for LLM Training," demonstrating successful scaling of the Muon optimizer.[25] The Muon optimizer, which uses momentum orthogonalized by Newton-Schulz iterations, achieves approximately 2× computational efficiency compared to AdamW under compute-optimal conditions.[26]
Key innovations include:
Based on the Muon optimizer research, Moonshot AI released Moonlight, a series of MoE models in 3B and 16B parameter configurations, trained with 5.7 trillion tokens.[27] The models demonstrated superior performance compared to similar-scale models while requiring significantly fewer training FLOPs.[26]
Moonshot AI is headquartered at:
The company also maintains an office in Shanghai.[29]
As of 2025, Moonshot AI employs approximately 300 people, having grown from just 40 employees at the time of its initial funding in October 2023 and approximately 80 employees in February 2024.[29][30]
During China's June 2025 gaokao period, Moonshot AI, along with several major tech platforms including Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent, temporarily restricted certain AI features to mitigate exam-related misuse and prevent cheating.[31]
In June 2024, reports suggested Moonshot AI was planning to expand into the US market with products like Ohai (a social AI app) and Noisee (an audio generation tool), but the company denied these intentions, stating no overseas products were in development.[32]
Following the February 2024 funding round, reports emerged that CEO Yang Zhilin and related individuals cashed out $40 million in shares, an unusually large amount for a first-year startup, raising concerns among investors.[33]
In November 2024, a group of investors filed for arbitration against the company's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, alleging that funding rounds were conducted without obtaining required consent from some AI-focused investors.[1] The dispute involved GSR Ventures China and four other firms that had invested in Yang Zhilin's previous venture, Recurrent AI.[34]
This led to reduced involvement from some investors and ongoing legal proceedings into 2025. Additional disputes involved alleged conflicts of interest related to a spin-off company and fiduciary breaches, further complicating investor relations.[35] As of February 2025, the arbitration case advanced without settlement.[36]
Moonshot AI is considered one of China's "Four AI Tigers" or "Six Tigers" alongside:
The company competes with both domestic and international AI companies including:
Yang Zhilin has described his vision for Moonshot AI as combining "the technology idealism of OpenAI and business philosophy of ByteDance."[3] This philosophy aims to balance AGI's far-reaching potential with the need for practical, user-centered solutions that can sustain a commercially viable enterprise.[9]
The company's mission is inherently global in scope. Yang has stated: "We don't want to be anything Chinese, nor necessarily OpenAI," arguing that a truly impactful AGI company cannot endure long-term if confined to a regional market.[9]
Moonshot AI has made several significant open-source contributions to the AI community:
