#NvidiaMarketCapBackAbove5.4T #Kimi秘密交表启动港股IPO “Moonshot AI” (Kimi) secretly files with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to launch its IPO, aiming for a $50 billion valuation as an AI unicorn

#Kimi秘密交表启动港股IPO “Moonshot AI” (Kimi) secretly files with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to launch its IPO, aiming for a $50 billion valuation as an AI unicorn

On the evening of September 2, 2026, major market news emerged that Moonshot AI, a leading domestic AI foundation-model unicorn and the parent company of Kimi, had confidentially filed its A1 listing application with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week, officially launching its Hong Kong IPO process.
The A1 document is the formal core application for a Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing. This confidential filing marks the company’s capitalization process entering the substantive implementation stage.
In response to the listing rumors, Moonshot AI officially stated: “We do not comment on market rumors, and currently have no information to disclose.” Alongside the IPO filing, Moonshot AI is also advancing its final key pre-IPO financing round. It is currently raising funds at a pre-money valuation of $50 billion. This round will most likely be the company’s final financing before its IPO, further strengthening its capital base for the listing, optimizing its shareholder structure, and supplementing operating and R&D funds. Looking back at the pace of its listing preparations, Moonshot AI’s Hong Kong IPO plans have long been progressing steadily. As early as March 2026, Bloomberg disclosed that Moonshot AI had initially begun planning a Hong Kong IPO and started discussions with leading investment banks including CICC and Goldman Sachs; on July 19, the company shared its listing plan with investors, making clear that it could list in Hong Kong within as little as six months, and issued a Hong Kong listing resolution document to all shareholders. At that time, the company’s post-money valuation was expected to exceed $30 billion; on July 21, Bloomberg followed up by reporting that the company planned to begin negotiations for its final pre-IPO financing round, with a target valuation of $50 billion.
From preliminary discussions and shareholder resolutions to the formal filing, Moonshot AI’s listing path is clear and its pace continues to accelerate.

“Moonshot AI” was founded in March 2023 and is headquartered in Beijing. It was co-founded by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. The company’s name pays tribute to The Dark Side of the Moon, the classic album by Pink Floyd, Yang Zhilin’s favorite band; its founding coincided with the album’s 50th anniversary, making the name especially commemorative. The company focuses on the R&D and implementation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), specializing in the iteration of next-generation cross-modal foundation-model technologies and their application across scenarios. It is a core member of China’s “AI Six Tigers” and one of the country’s leading general-AI innovators in terms of commercialization and technological progress. Founder Yang Zhilin is a leading young AI scientist in China and a benchmark post-1990s entrepreneur. Born in Shantou, Guangdong, in 1992, he secured admission to Tsinghua University through a first-place finish in the Guangdong division of the National Olympiad in Informatics. He graduated from Tsinghua’s Department of Computer Science in 2015 with the top academic results in his year, then went to the United States to pursue a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied under industry leaders including Apple’s head of AI and Google’s chief AI scientist. After years of work in NLP, he was the first author of the key papers behind the two classic models Transformer-XL and XLNet. His papers have received more than 17,000 citations in total, making him the most-cited researcher in China’s natural-language-processing field under the age of 35. In his professional career, Yang Zhilin worked at Facebook AI Research and Google Brain, two of the world’s leading AI laboratories, and was deeply involved in developing well-known foundation models including Google Gemini, Pangu NLP, and WuDao. The Pangu NLP foundation model he led won the SAIL Award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. He also serves as an assistant professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences and as a principal investigator at the Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute, combining academic and industrial strength. He has received multiple major industry honors, including being named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Fortune China’s 40 Under 40 business elites, and the Hurun U40 China Entrepreneurship Pioneers lists. In 2025, he appeared on the Hurun Rich List with a fortune of RMB 7.3 billion.

Technology continues to reach new heights as Kimi K3 reshapes global AI rankings
Over its three years since founding, Moonshot AI has consistently led the iteration of China-made foundation-model technologies, building a complete technology matrix spanning foundation models, code models, and multimodal models. The company’s core product, the AI assistant Kimi, officially launched in October 2023. It achieved differentiated breakthroughs with its powerful long-context processing capabilities, initially supporting input of 200,000 Chinese characters and later opening an internal test supporting up to 2 million characters, breaking the industry’s upper limit for text processing. It subsequently expanded into capabilities including visual understanding, deep research, office processing, multimodal programming, and AI Agent clusters across a full range of scenarios. Its model-iteration speed leads the industry, and the company has continued to open-source and iterate multiple high-performance models: in 2025, it successively launched the trillion-parameter Kimi K2 open-source foundation model and the 72B-parameter Kimi-Dev code model; in 2026, it rapidly released iterative versions including K2.5, K2.6, and K2.7 Code, with K2.7 Code reaching 1.1 trillion parameters. In July 2026, the company released its milestone Kimi K3 foundation model, with as many as 2.8 trillion parameters. Built on its proprietary KDA hybrid linear-attention mechanism and attention-residual technology, it natively supports visual understanding and has a context window of up to 1 million tokens. It is the world’s first open-source large language model with nearly 3 trillion parameters. Within hours of its launch, the model topped the globally authoritative AI coding evaluation leaderboard Frontend Code Arena with a score of 1679, surpassing OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic Claude Fable 5. This marked the first time a Chinese foundation model had topped a leading global coding evaluation leaderboard, signifying that China-made foundation models had officially entered the global first tier.
In underlying foundational technologies, Moonshot AI possesses world-class original capabilities. The RoPE relative positional encoding and group normalization techniques invented by its team have become core underlying components of major global AI models including Meta LLaMa, Google PaLM, and Stable Diffusion, providing key technological support for the development of the global foundation-model industry. Commercialization accelerates, with users and revenue continuing to grow

Commercially, Moonshot AI is one of China’s fastest-moving AI foundation-model startups in terms of implementation.
Relying on Kimi’s differentiated long-context and multimodal capabilities, the product quickly gained widespread attention after launch. By October 2024, monthly active users had surpassed 36 million, building a massive consumer user base and developer ecosystem. As the company has strategically focused on improving the quality and efficiency of commercialization, its user mix has continued to improve and enterprise paid services have grown rapidly. The company’s annual recurring revenue has now reached $300 million, and its commercialization loop is largely complete.

Financing surges, with cumulative funding exceeding RMB 37.6 billion and valuation surpassing $50 billion
With its hard-core technology and impressive commercialization performance, Moonshot AI has continued to attract strong interest from capital markets. Its financing speed, scale, and investor lineup all rank first among Chinese AI startups. Just two months after its founding, the company completed an angel round of more than $200 million, with top institutions including Sequoia China, ZhenFund, Lishi Capital, and Capital Today participating, valuing the company at $300 million post-money. The company’s valuation then soared, with financing continuing to accelerate: in February 2024, it completed more than $1 billion in financing led by Alibaba, at a valuation of $2.5 billion; in August 2024, it raised another $300 million, with Tencent participating, lifting its valuation to $3.3 billion; in December 2025, it completed a $500 million Series C round led by IDG, with Alibaba and Tencent continuing to increase their investments, at a valuation of $4.3 billion; in February 2026, it completed a $700 million financing round, with its valuation surpassing $10 billion; in May 2026, it completed a $2 billion Series D round led by Meituan Longzhu, bringing in state-owned and industry capital including China Mobile, CPE Source Peak, and Guozhi Investment, at a valuation of $20 billion. To date, the company’s cumulative financing has exceeded RMB 37.6 billion, the highest total financing among startups in China’s foundation-model sector. As its latest financing round progresses, the company’s pre-money valuation has reached $50 billion, making it a top unicorn in China’s AI sector.

Industry landscape reshaped as China-made foundation models enter a capitalization高潮
As a core company among China’s “AI Six Tigers,” Moonshot AI’s Hong Kong IPO filing marks the formal entry of China’s homegrown foundation-model companies into the harvest phase of capitalization. Backed by original underlying technologies, globally leading model performance, a mature commercialization system, and an elite capital lineup, Moonshot AI has the strength to benchmark itself against the world’s top AI companies. As competition in the AI industry shifts from technological iteration toward commercialization and large-scale expansion, Moonshot AI continues to strengthen its general-AI infrastructure capabilities, using technology as its foundation, capital as its support, and applications as its anchor. Following the completion of its Hong Kong IPO, the company will further leverage capital-market strength to increase investment in underlying technology R&D, expand applications across government, enterprise, and industrial sectors, and improve its AI ecosystem. It is expected to continue leading the overseas expansion and industrial implementation of China-made foundation models, reshaping the competitive landscape of the global AI industry.$KIMI ‌