China’s AI chatbot labs are currently attracting big investors.

In a week when rival DeepSeek is reported to be raising at a $45bn valuation, Moonshot AI, the maker of the popular Kimi AI models, has beaten it to the headlines with its own $2bn raise.

The round was led by Meituan Dragonball, with participation from Shuimu Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng, among others, according to a statement from Huafeng Capital, the financial advisor to some of the investors in the transaction.

The news comes as the Financial Times cited sources saying Moonshot’s biggest rival DeepSeek could be valued at around $45bn as it looks set to raise some $4bn to $5bn in the coming days.

DeepSeek took the world by storm in January 2025 when it released its powerful large language model R1, sending Silicon Valley leaders into a flurry as the start-up claimed that its model was leagues cheaper than its US competitors – costing only $5.6m to train – while performing on par with models from industry heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Moonshot’s Kimi models were the first from a major Chinese competitor to take on DeepSeek, and today its K2.6 model ranks in OpenRouter’s top three in the world for token usage.

Tsinghua University graduate Yang Zhilin founded Moonshot in 2023 and it has influential backers that include Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. It had strong initial success with Kimi, thanks in part to its AI search functions and long text analysis. DeepSeek’s release saw it lose ground at the time, but various iterations of Kimi 2 since have seen it grow in popularity among developers.

In March of this year, San Francisco-based AI darling Cursor had to come clean and admit its latest model was based on Kimi 2.5, after similarities were spotted by an eagle-eyed user and posted on X. Cursor has since inked a deal with SpaceX that allows Elon Musk’s company to acquire it for $60bn.

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