Moonshot AI valued at $35 billion after $3.5 billion raise

The Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has reached a valuation of $35 billion after closing a $3.5 billion funding round, a massive influx of capital driven by the breakthrough success of its latest Kimi K3 model. The Beijing-based company, founded in 2023, now surpasses the market capitalization of established Indian technology firms like Wipro and Tech Mahindra.

The funding, which sources said far exceeded the company's initial target of $1 billion to $2 billion, was led by investors including China's state-backed National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. This round follows a $2 billion raise in May that valued Moonshot at $20 billion, illustrating the company's meteoric rise from a $300 million valuation at its launch.

The surge in investor interest is directly tied to the July 16 release of the Kimi K3 model, which company officials said boasts 2.8 trillion parameters and a one-million-token context window, allowing it to process vast documents or codebases in a single prompt. The model's performance is reported to closely rival leading frontier models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Since its debut, daily sales for Moonshot...