Lokesh Choudhary · · 1 min readAlibaba co-leads $1b round in Chinese genAI startup
Photo Credit: Kimi Chat
China is moving fast with its generative AI efforts. Companies like Alibaba and Baidu have launched their alternatives to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Another player is Moonshot AI, whose smart chatbot Kimi Chat is built on its proprietary large language model. The company has secured over US$1 billion in funding spearheaded by Alibaba and HongShan, the Chinese spin-off of US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, the South China Morning Post reported.
The fresh capital, which is said to be the single largest investment for a Chinese AI startup since ChatGPT’s launch, brings Moonshot AI’s valuation to US$2.5 billion.
The company was founded last year by Yang Zhilin, a computer science graduate from Tsinghua University. He previously established a sales tech company called Recurrent.ai in 2016, with the team from that startup following Yang to Moonshot AI.
It launched Kimi Chat last October. The chatbot can understand and respond to conversations that include up to 200,000 Chinese characters.
See also: South Korean startup serves pizza with AI and robotics. But is it a flash in the pan?
Editing by Putra Muskita and Lorenzo Kyle Subido
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