Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI recently pocketed another $1 billion in a fresh funding round that roped in its shareholders including HongShan (previously Sequoia Capital China) and Monolith Management.
The round also saw the participation of major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, social e-commerce app Xiaohongshu, and food delivery giant Meituan, Chinese tech news outlet 36Kr reported on Monday.
As the largest deal within the AI large language model (LLM) sector ever recorded in China, the transaction has pushed the firm’s post-money valuation to $2.5 billion.
Founded in March 2023, the firm has quickly emerged to be a challenger to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Moonshot AI attempts to stand out in the LLM race by its chatbot’s ability to process a large corpus of Chinese text data.
As a proof, the firm claims that its multi-modal chatbot program — dubbed as Kimi Chat — can read about 200,000 Chinese characters, while Anthropic’s Claude-100k and OpenAI’s GPT-4-32k can process around 80,000 and 25,000 words, respectively, when tested by the Moonshot AI team.
Previously, the firm snapped $200 million in a funding round that saw the participation of HongShan and ZhenFund.
The funding comes after a banner 2023 for Chinese AI firms, as investors flocked to bet big on the country’s up-and-rising generative AI projects.
01.AI, founded by Sinovation Ventures’ Kai-Fu Lee, hit a unicorn valuation within eight months after its establishment, while Baichuan Intelligent Technology, led by Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of Tencent-owned internet search engine Sogou Inc, sealed its Series A1 funding round at $300 million from Chinese tech juggernauts including the likes of Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, and Xiaomi Corp in October.
Chinese artificial intelligence-related firm Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology, too, secured over 2.5 billion yuan ($341.82 million) in October, counting Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Xiaomi, and Legend Capital among some of its backers.