AI 2026: China’s Moonshot AI Contends For Technical Leadership
The startup is backed by China's tech giants and led by a skilled researcher aiming to create artificial general intelligence, seeking a competitive edge in algorithmic and architectural innovations.
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Moonshot AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence startup founded in March 2023 by currently 33-year-old CEO Yang Zhilin, a leading researcher in the field of natural language processing and the development of the transformer architecture that underpins recent advances in large language models (LLMs), through widely-cited papers such as XLNet and Transformer-XL. Through its flagship Kimi series of models, the company develops both open-source and paid models that have become notable for their high performance and cost-efficiency. The company’s Kimi K2 model, for example, performed extremely well both on benchmarks and in practice for generating code as well as when it is used as an “agent” performing multiple tasks in sequence, becoming the world’s leading open-source model following its release in July 2025.1 The company has raised at least $1.2 billion at a valuation of over $3 billion as of late 2024, including from multiple of China’s tech giants, making it one of the best-funded AI startups in China.2 Moonshot employs around 300 people and is based in Beijing, with an office in Shanghai.3 In Chinese, the company’s name translates as “Dark Side of the Moon.”