Moonshot intends to go public in Hong Kong within the next six months, aiming for a valuation of $30 billion.

      Moonshot AI is gearing up for a Hong Kong IPO within the next six months, targeting a valuation of over $30 billion. The company's annual recurring revenue reached $300 million in June, up from $200 million in April. Recently, Moonshot introduced the Kimi K3 model, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that performed on par with or surpassed Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 across various benchmarks. The IPO preparations were underway before the K3 was launched, but the model's positive reception, which impacted global tech stocks and drew mixed reactions from former White House AI advisor David Sacks, provided strong validation for the IPO plans. Notably, K3 outperformed Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on several key benchmarks, marking it as the first Chinese open-weight model to achieve this.

      Moonshot AI is currently dismantling its offshore Variable Interest Entity (VIE) structure to facilitate a smoother listing in light of the CSRC's updated regulations. Earlier reports indicated that the company had decided against pursuing a VIE waiver, recognizing that Beijing would not grant an exemption. CICC and Goldman Sachs are in discussions to assist with the public offering. Co-founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor with experience at Meta and Google, the company is named after a Pink Floyd album.

      If successful, the IPO would stand as one of the largest listings for Chinese AI companies to date. The pricing of K3 aligns with that of Anthropic’s Sonnet, suggesting that Moonshot intends to position itself at a premium compared to other Chinese models. The company offers tiered subscriptions for chatbots and enterprise API access, and has recently launched Kimi Work, a versatile AI agent. However, its revenue is still below that of Z.AI, which is on pace to generate $1 billion in annual sales. Meanwhile, DeepSeek is planning its own IPO for 2027. This pursuit to go public is also about establishing the market valuation benchmarks for Chinese AI, and with a rising $30 billion valuation, Moonshot aims to be the first to achieve this milestone.