Moonshot AI
Chinese artificial intelligence startup founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. The company develops the Kimi chatbot and large language models, including the Kimi K2 series.
Overview
- Founded: March 2023
- Founders: Yang Zhilin (CEO), Zhou Xinyu, Wu Yuxin
- Valuation: $3.3-3.8 billion (2025)
- Headquarters: China
- Main Products: Kimi chatbot, Kimi K2 LLM series
Founder Background
Yang Zhilin is a computer scientist who earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University after graduating from Tsinghua University. He worked at Meta Platforms and Google Brain during his doctoral studies. The company name was inspired by Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon” (50th anniversary in 2023), Yang’s favorite album.
Key Milestones
- March 2023: Company founded
- October 2023: Launched Kimi chatbot (named after Yang’s English nickname) with 2 million Chinese character context capability
- January 2025: Released Kimi K1.5, matching OpenAI o1 performance
- July 2025: Released Kimi K2 (1 trillion parameters, 15.5 trillion training tokens)
- November 2025: Released Kimi K2 Thinking (open-source reasoning model)
Funding
Latest funding round (~3.8 billion pre-money.