Valuation exceeds $20 billion: Meituan Longzhu leads a $2 billion new financing round for Moon’s Dark Side

Ask AI · What impact will DeepSeek’s financing have on the competitive landscape of the dark side of the moon?

Interface News reporter | Song Jiannan

On May 7, according to Huafeng Capital, the domestic leading large-model company the dark side of the moon (Kimi) has recently completed a new round of financing of approximately $2 billion. Its post-investment valuation has surpassed $20 billion. This is the largest single financing round since the dark side of the moon was founded, and is also one of the highest-value private financings to date among domestic large-model startups.

This round was led by Meituan Longzhu, with participation from Shuimu Capital, China Mobile, CPE (CITIC Industry Fund), and others. Huafeng Capital acted as a financial advisor for some of the buyers in this transaction, providing key support in deal-structure design, investor matching, and negotiations.

In less than half a year, the company has completed four rounds of financing in quick succession, with a cumulative amount of over $3.9 billion. Its total financing amount has surpassed peers such as Zhipu AI and MiniMax, ranking first among domestic large-model startups. Compared with the valuation of approximately $4.3 billion in November 2025, the current valuation is more than 4x higher.

The dark side of the moon was founded in April 2023. Its founder Yang Zhilin is an undergraduate from Tsinghua University and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He previously worked at Google Brain and Meta AI and is a top researcher in the field of NLP. Only two months after the company’s establishment, it completed nearly 2 billion yuan in an angel round, with leading institutions such as Sequoia China and ZhenFund entering the picture. In October 2023, it launched Kimi Chat, supporting input of 200,000 Chinese characters, establishing a differentiated competitive advantage through long-text processing.

In February 2024, the dark side of the moon completed financing of more than $1 billion, reaching a valuation of $2.5 billion; in August of the same year, it secured an additional more than $300 million, bringing its valuation up to $3.3 billion. In December 2025, it completed a $500 million Series C round, with a valuation of $4.3 billion and book cash exceeding 10 billion yuan.

In the first two months of this year, the company consecutively completed three rounds of financing of $500 million, $700 million, and $700 million. Its valuation rose from $10 billion to $18 billion, as long-time shareholders including Alibaba, Tencent, and Wuyuan Capital continued to increase their investment.

Including this latest round, Kimi’s total financing amount has exceeded 376 billion yuan, making it the domestic large-model startup with the highest cumulative funding. For comparison, MiniMax has raised approximately 150 billion yuan, while Zhipu has raised approximately 130 billion yuan. As of the time of publication, MiniMax’s market value is about 220.7 billion yuan, and Zhipu’s is about 362.7 billion yuan.

Huafeng Capital believes that the dark side of the moon’s current valuation of about 1,400 billion yuan still has significant room for growth. This round of financing will further consolidate Kimi’s leading position in model SOTA, computing power reserves, and talent incentives.

Technological iteration and a commercial surge jointly underpin the dark side of the moon’s high valuation. On April 20, the dark side of the moon released and open-sourced the Kimi K2.6 model—its strongest code model to date. Its long-range encoding capability has been significantly improved, and its agent autonomous execution capability has been greatly enhanced. Kimi K2.6 is now available on kimi.com, the latest Kimi app, Kimi API, and the Kimi Code programming assistant.

In March this year, Interface News previously reported exclusively that one month after the Kimi K2.5 model was released, the dark side of the moon’s ARR (annual recurring revenue) exceeded $100 million. According to Huafeng Capital, benefiting from iterative improvements in model capabilities, the dark side of the moon’s ARR surpassed $200 million in April, with paid subscriptions and API revenue accelerating in growth.

With revenues surging, market rumors have repeatedly circulated that the dark side of the moon is about to IPO. But regarding the listing, founder Yang Zhilin has shown a notably calm attitude.

In an internal letter released at the end of last year, Yang Zhilin previously said that the company’s B-round and C-round financing amounts exceeded the fundraising of most IPOs and the private placements of listed companies. “So we are not in a hurry to go public in the short term. Of course, in the future, we plan to use going public as a means to accelerate AGI, timing it as we see fit, with the initiative in our hands.”

At present, the domestic large-model sector has formed three major camps: internet giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba rely on ecosystems and computing power to comprehensively dominate; Zhipu AI, MiniMax, and others have successively listed on Hong Kong’s stock market, gaining advantages in capital markets; and emerging players such as DeepSeek have rapidly risen through open-source and low-cost strategies.

The dark side of the moon’s core moat is long-text processing. Kimi leads in penetration in knowledge-work scenarios, but long-text capabilities have gradually become the industry standard, and its technological moat continues to narrow. In terms of commercialization, the company faces pressure in growth of consumer-side users. On the enterprise side, its customized offerings and ecosystem development lag behind the giants and some peer companies. It is overly reliant on API and subscription models, and risks arising from a single revenue structure are increasingly prominent.

In addition, issues such as high computing costs and fierce talent competition still pose challenges to the dark side of the moon’s long-term development.

On the same day that rumors of the dark side of the moon’s new financing surfaced, DeepSeek was reported to be in talks with the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund to lead its first round of external financing, with a post-investment valuation potentially reaching around $45 billion. However, some sources say that the final valuation has not yet been finalized, and the final investor list and deal terms are still under negotiation. Analysts believe that DeepSeek’s willingness to open up to external financing may be to expand its computing resources while retaining top technical talent.

In February last year, when Kimi released its reasoning model K1.5, it had its market attention largely diverted by DeepSeek-R1, which was released and open-sourced on the same day. After that, the company decided to significantly scale back its product deployment budget, including pausing deployments across multiple Android channels and cooperation with third-party advertising platforms, thereby putting the brakes on “burning money.” Before DeepSeek’s rise, Kimi had been the most talked-about AI product domestically at the time.

As large-model companies strengthen their own technological moats, the dark side of the moon also urgently needs to replenish its funding “ammunition,” while guarding against core technical personnel being poached by competitors.