Chinese AI company headquartered in Beijing, founded in 2023, known for the Kimi K2 trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts LLM and the Kimi assistant. One of China's so-called Six AI Tigers.
Moonshot AI (formally Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.; Chinese: 北京月之暗面科技有限公司, Yuè Zhī Ànmiàn - "Dark Side of the Moon") is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, former Tsinghua University schoolmates. It is headquartered in the Haidian District of Beijing. The company develops foundation models including the Kimi product family (an AI assistant available in China since October 2023) and the open-source Kimi K2 model family (a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts language model released in July 2025 under a modified MIT license) and Kimi K2 Thinking (November 2025). Moonshot AI is one of China's so-called Six AI Tigers. Key investors include Alibaba (February 2024, USD 1 billion, ~36% stake), Tencent and Gaorong Capital (August 2024, USD 300 million), and IDG Capital (October 2025, ~USD 600 million). In March 2026, the company was reportedly considering an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Notable technical contributions include the Mooncake serving platform (handling 100 billion tokens daily, awarded the Erik Riedel Best Paper Award at USENIX FAST), scaling of the Muon optimizer for LLM training, and reinforcement learning research underpinning the Kimi K1.5 model.
Founders
Tsinghua University alumnus. Previously an NLP researcher, co-author of Transformer-XL among others.
Classification
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