companies

Moonshot AI

Beijing-based AI lab behind the Kimi chatbot and the open-weight Kimi K2 large language model family.

Moonshot AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence company headquartered in Beijing, founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin, former schoolmates at Tsinghua University. Yang, a former Google Brain and Meta AI researcher and co-author of the Transformer-XL and XLNet papers, serves as CEO. The company's consumer product Kimi launched in October 2023 as one of the first Chinese chatbots to support very long context windows, and Moonshot has since released the Kimi K2 family of large, open-weight mixture-of-experts language models (including K2, K2.5, and K2.6/K2.7 coding-focused variants) that compete with leading Western open models on coding and agentic benchmarks. Backed by Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, and other investors, Moonshot AI raised roughly $2 billion in 2026 at a $20 billion valuation, making it one of China's best-funded AI labs.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Beijing, China

Sector

lab