Moonshot AI has raised $3.5 billion, valuing the company at $35 billion — far above its initial $1–2 billion target. The Beijing startup, buoyed by the success of its K3 model, is already lining up a final financing round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO, possibly as soon as this year.
Massive raise, record valuation
Originally targeting $1–2 billion, Moonshot secured $3.5 billion in a “just-closed” round, according to people familiar with the matter. That financing sets the company’s valuation at about $35 billion, and Moonshot is said to be courting investors for one last round that would peg the pre-money valuation at $50 billion ahead of a possible public listing. A Moonshot spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
K3: an unusually open, large-scale model
Much of Moonshot’s rapid rise is credited to K3, which the company says approaches the performance of leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. K3 reportedly contains 2.8 trillion parameters (2.8 x 10^12) and supports a context window of one million tokens, enabling the handling of extremely long documents or codebases in a single request. In an uncommon move for a model of this scale, Moonshot published K3’s weights, allowing developers to download, modify, and self-host the model.
Commercial impact and revenue momentum
People close to the company say Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) jumped to $300 million in June, up from $200 million in April. Since K3’s launch, daily sales are said to have increased by at least sixfold, according to an anonymous source cited by those same contacts.
Geopolitical and technical scrutiny
Moonshot’s rise comes against a backdrop of U.S.–China tensions. A White House official has accused the company of training K3 on Nvidia chips that are subject to export restrictions and has reiterated allegations of “distillation,” a process by which capabilities can be transferred from restricted models. These claims add regulatory and reputational questions to Moonshot’s rapid commercial expansion.
Next steps
With strong revenue growth and a high-profile model that’s drawing both developer interest and regulatory scrutiny, Moonshot is positioning itself for a final private round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation and a potential IPO in Hong Kong later this year.
