China’s Moonshot AI has released an upgrade to its flagship model, Kimi, ahead of an expected rollout by competitor DeepSeek.

The new model, K2.5, can process text, images, and videos from a single prompt, aligning with industry trends towards multi-modal models.

Moonshot, backed by Alibaba, recently raised US$500 million at a valuation of US$4.3 billion and is seeking additional funding to reach up to US$5 billion.

The latest model outperforms some open-source peers on benchmark tests and is rolling out an automated coding tool designed to rival Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Moonshot was founded by former Tsinghua University professor Yang Zhilin, who previously worked at Meta and Google.

The firm offers subscription plans for its chatbot and supplies solutions to enterprise clients but trails rivals like Zhipu and MiniMax in commercialization.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

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