Company Overview

Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 as a startup in the field of general artificial intelligence in mainland China. Dedicated to finding the optimal solution for transforming energy into intelligence and co-creating intelligence with users through products, in October 2023, the company launched the world's first intelligent assistant product, Kimi AI, which supports input of 200,000 Chinese characters. This marks the company's first attempt in the To C super application field. Kimi Intelligent Assistant, with its long text processing capabilities and lossless memory features, provides users with a high-quality interactive experience.

Kimi's Explosion, Making Moonshot AI the Center of Capital Pursuit

According to data from the new media "AI Product List," in April 2024, the web page visits of Kimi Intelligent Assistant reached 20.04 million, an increase of 60.2% compared to March, surpassing Baidu's "Wenxin Yiyan" and ranking first among similar products in mainland China. According to internal evaluations, Kimi's text capabilities have fully reached the level of GPT-4, and Kimi's Chinese and English generation capabilities have approached the level of GPT-4.

This product really became popular in March of this year, and it also led Moonshot AI into the public eye. On March 18, Moonshot AI announced: Kimi Intelligent Assistant has made another breakthrough in long context window technology, increasing the lossless context length from 200,000 characters to 2 million characters. Since 9:30 am on March 20, Kimi's system traffic has continued to abnormally increase, far exceeding the company's previous planning.

Since its establishment, in less than a year, Moonshot AI's latest valuation has reached 3 billion US dollars, with new entries including Tencent, Gaorong Venture Capital and other institutions. This also means that Chinese large model startup companies have entered the 2 billion RMB club.

In fact, in June 2023, the company had already completed an angel round of financing of 2 billion yuan, with investors including Sequoia China, ZhenFund, and Capital Today. In July of the same year, Moonshot AI completed another round of financing, led by Meituan Longzhu. In February 2024, Moonshot AI completed a round of financing over 1 billion US dollars. Led by Alibaba, Sequoia China, Meituan, Xiaohongshu and others participated, with a post-investment valuation of 2.5 billion US dollars (equivalent to 18 billion RMB), with Alibaba alone investing nearly 800 million US dollars. Moonshot AI has also become the "unicorn" with the highest valuation in the mainland large model track.

At present, the list of shareholders of Moonshot AI includes at least more than twenty investors, including but not limited to: Alibaba, Lix Capital, Sequoia China, Capital Today, ZhenFund, Meituan Longzhu, Xianghe Capital, Xiaohongshu, China Merchants China Fund, FunPlus Games, Jiuan Medical, Shunwei Capital, BlueRun Ventures, 5Y Capital, Yunjiu Capital, Yuanma Capital, Tencent, Gaorong Venture Capital, etc. This wave of Kimi has triggered a new wave of large model heat, and Alibaba and Tencent, the two giants, chose to stand together for the first time.

Moonshot AI's Development Focus: To C

"To C is the only opportunity for AI to become a super APP in the future."

If the future development of large models is likely to be divided into two different camps of to B and to C, then Moonshot AI will firmly join the to C camp.

Different from other mainland large model players who are keen on the "to B empowerment" approach, Moonshot AI has taken a different path and made to C the focus of development. Founder Yang Zhilin said, "Moonshot AI wants to provide individuals with more convenient, more powerful, and more personalized inclusive products through AI." Currently, Moonshot AI has a high-priority task, which is to find the direction of products, technology, and markets in the C end.