Moonshot AI, the Beijing startup behind the popular Kimi chatbot, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to people familiar with the filing, positioning one of China's best-funded AI labs to go public within months.
The company is seeking to raise up to $3 billion in the offering, according to reports of the filing, at a valuation of roughly $50 billion — sharply above the price of its most recent private funding round. Goldman Sachs, China International Capital Corp. and Deutsche Bank are underwriting the offering, and Moonshot has restructured from an offshore holding company to an onshore Chinese entity, a step often required to clear Beijing's approval process for overseas listings.
Moonshot was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Carnegie Mellon researcher, and has built its reputation on the Kimi family of models. In July it released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model the company described as the largest of its kind. The startup has raised more than $5.5 billion to date, including a round of more than $2 billion from Meituan, China Mobile and CPE, with earlier backing from Alibaba, Tencent, IDG Capital and HSG, the firm formerly known as Sequoia Capital China.
A listing would make Moonshot the latest Chinese AI developer to test Hong Kong's exchange as U.S. markets remain largely closed to Chinese AI firms amid export controls and national-security scrutiny. Rival DeepSeek is privately valued at around $74 billion, while Z.AI, formerly known as Zhipu, has already gone public in Hong Kong at a market capitalization near $66 billion; fellow AI developer MiniMax listed there earlier this year as well. Hong Kong has become the default venue for that wave of listings, as strong local investor appetite and continued restrictions on Chinese firms' access to U.S. capital markets push companies that might once have eyed New York toward an exchange closer to home.
The filing is confidential, meaning Moonshot's finances won't become public unless and until regulators clear the listing and the company proceeds to a public prospectus. The company had denied similar reports of an imminent filing in August and declined to comment on the latest one when contacted by reporters this month. No listing date has been set.
