Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI startup behind the Kimi chatbot, plans to begin talks in August for what was described as its final funding round before an initial public offering, according to person at a participating investment institution.

The company is targeting a US$50 billion pre-money valuation.

The report added that Moonshot AI’s latest disclosed financing carried a US$31.5 billion pre-money valuation at the end of June.

The report came five days after Moonshot AI released K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a 1-million-token context window for coding, knowledge work, and reasoning.

The model outperformed some rivals on coding and AI agent benchmarks, while still trailing top systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Moonshot AI is best known for Kimi, which ranked third among Chinese AI chatbots by monthly active users in August 2024.

The company had raised US$2 billion in May at a valuation of more than US$20 billion, with backers including Alibaba and Tencent.

🔗 Source: Yicai

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