In a move that underscores the fierce competition between Chinese startups and Silicon Valley’s AI giants, Moonshot AI is currently in discussions to raise new capital at a $10 billion valuation. Reported on February 16, 2026, this latest funding push comes just six weeks after the company secured $500 million in a Series C round that valued it at $4.3 billion.
The aggressive valuation jump is driven by an oversubscription of interest from existing backers, including Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, and 5Y Capital, who have already committed over $700 million in the initial phase of this expanded round.
Rapid Valuation Trajectory (2024–2026)
Moonshot AI’s valuation has nearly quadrupled in less than two years, fueled by its “long-context” lead and rapid monetization.
| Date | Funding Round | Valuation | Key Lead Investors |
| Feb 2024 | Series B | $2.5 Billion | Alibaba, Meituan, HongShan |
| Aug 2024 | Strategic | $3.3 Billion | Tencent, Gaorong Capital |
| Jan 2026 | Series C | $4.3 Billion | IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent |
| Feb 2026 | Expansion | $10 Billion (Target) | Alibaba, Tencent, 5Y Capital |
Operational Explosions: The “Kimi” Effect
The surge in investor confidence follows a period of “staggering” commercial performance for the Beijing-based startup.
- User Growth: Moonshot reported a 170% month-on-month jump in its global base of paying users between September and November 2025.
- Token Volume: Its serving platform, Mooncake, currently processes a massive 100 billion tokens every day.
- Cash Reserves: Following its Series C, the company entered 2026 with a financial war chest exceeding 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion).
- Kimi Claw Beta: On February 16, 2026, the company launched Kimi Claw, a cloud-native “24/7” AI agent service based on the open-source OpenClaw framework, allowing users to run autonomous agents directly in their browser.
Technical Milestone: Kimi K2.5 Multimodal Upgrade
In January 2026, Moonshot released Kimi K2.5, which added native vision capabilities via a 400-million-parameter vision encoder called MoonViT.
- Video Reasoning: The model can process both images and video, enabling “agentic” tasks such as replicating a website user journey simply by watching a video demonstration.
- Long-Context Edge: Kimi remains a leader in processing ultra-long inputs, handling up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt—a feature critical for deep legal and medical analysis.
- AGI Roadmap: Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin (a Google and Meta alumnus) has stated that the current capital influx will be used to double GPU capacity to train the forthcoming K3 model, with the goal of matching global frontier AI capabilities by late 2026.
“Moonshot isn’t just building a chatbot; they are building the ‘intelligence infrastructure’ for a market where access to US-based platforms remains restricted. At a $10 billion valuation, they are now China’s premier challenger to the OpenAI-Anthropic duopoly.” — Market Analyst Perspective.
