Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open source models are still facing no shortage of interest from those who don't mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice. Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some investors who participated in the round. The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan's VC arm, Long-Z Investment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Also participating were Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng, according to the post. The company raised $3.9 billion over the past six months, according to Huafeng Capital. Moonshot was valued at $4.3 billion at the end of 2025, per reports, and by early 2026, that figure had more than doubled to $10 billion following a $700...
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