Kimi, the IPO is coming.

Source: HuntingCloud Curated Selection

After Zhipu and MiniMax, the secondary market is about to welcome the third large-model stock.

On March 26, according to Bloomberg, the general-purpose multimodal large-model R&D and application services provider Moonshot AI (Moonshot AI, referred to as Kimi) is in the early stages of considering its first-ever IPO in Hong Kong, and has already been in discussions with CICC and Goldman Sachs regarding potential listing matters.

It is worth noting that Kimi was just reported to have completed a $500 million Series C round at the end of 2025. Then, in February this year, it also completed more than $700 million in financing, and is currently raising another $1 billion round.

In less than three months, Kimi completed three rounds of financing in quick succession, with its valuation quadrupling: $4.3 billion, $10 billion, and $18 billion (about RMB 124.3 billion). This not only enabled it to become a “decacorn” (valuation over $10 billion) at the fastest pace, but also set a domestic record for the most consecutive financing rounds for a large-model company, with the amount exceeding the IPO proceeds raised by large-model companies in the same period.

And the pre-investment valuation of RMB 124.3 billion has already surpassed the market value on the first day of listing of Zhipu and MiniMax. Zhipu’s opening market cap was HK$52.827 billion (about RMB 46.7 billion), while MiniMax’s opening market cap was HK$71.902 billion (about RMB 63.5 billion).

As of today’s close, Zhipu’s total market cap was HK$305 billion, and MiniMax’s total market cap was HK$309.2 billion. In just under three months, the market caps of these two companies have increased by 3–5 times. The hot sentiment in the secondary market may also be one of the reasons Kimi is accelerating its push for a listing.

Analysts believe that financing and IPO progress in parallel means that Kimi’s capital moves today are no longer just about supplementing funding, but also preparing for the next stage of market-oriented and large-scale expansion.

Tsinghua top student startup; Meituan, Alibaba, and Tencent are all here—its latest valuation has reached $18 billion

Kimi is led by Professor Yang Zhilin from Tsinghua University’s Institute of Interdisciplinary Information and Professor Yang Zhulin (note: 杨植麟) as the lead; over the past five years, it ranked in the top 10 among Chinese scholars’ citation rankings in the NLP field, and ranked first among those under 40. The two co-founders Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin are also both from Tsinghua. The team has also successfully attracted overseas talent from leading global technology companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon.

In February 2023, when the large-model boom first began, rumors in the market said: “Yang Zhilin is being heavily expected, backed by incubator-style support from the leading VC firms in China.”

Two months later, Beijing Moonshot Technology Co., Ltd. was formally registered and established. At the beginning, around the Tsinghua-based founding team, the overseas talent came from leading global tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon.

Just two months after its founding, Kimi was reported to have completed its first round of financing. In October 2023, the company launched its first large model supporting input of 200,000 Chinese characters—moonshot—along with its intelligent assistant product Kimi Chat. At this communication meeting, Yang Zhilin confirmed that the company received nearly RMB 2 billion in investment from well-known institutions including Sequoia China, Today Capital, and Lthinking Capital.

Entering 2024, Zhipu completed four rounds of financing in quick succession. MiniMax and Kimi each completed two rounds of financing as well, without falling behind. The commonality is that through its two rounds of financing during 2024, Kimi gathered Meituan’s Longzhu, and also received investments from Alibaba and Tencent, albeit slightly later than the other two companies.

Zhipu, MiniMax, and Kimi are the large-model companies with Tencent, Alibaba, and Meituan jointly investing—so far, publicly verifiable as such.

In August 2024, when it was reported that it had completed a new round of $300 million financing, the post-money valuation was $3.3 billion. Entering 2025, Kimi completed only its $500 million Series C round at year-end, with valuation only slightly rising to $4.3 billion. At that time, Yang Zhulin released an internal letter saying the company has more than RMB 10 billion in cash reserves.

This scale is not inferior to Zhipu and MiniMax after their IPOs: the former had RMB 2.55 billion in cash as of June 2025, while the latter had RMB 7.35 billion in cash as of September 2025. Adding the net amount raised when accounting for the IPO: Zhipu is about HK$4.173 billion, MiniMax about HK$5.293 billion; the former has accumulated about RMB 6.2 billion, and the latter about RMB 12.0 billion.

At the start of 2026, Kimi’s financing and valuation keep rising, one after another—truly like riding a rocket. During the Spring Festival period, the company completed over $700 million in financing, reaching a valuation of $10 billion. In March this year, it is in the middle of a $1 billion financing round; the pre-money valuation has already climbed to $18 billion.

Currently, besides Tencent, Alibaba, and Meituan, Kimi has also already assembled well-known investors such as Sequoia China, Today Capital, Lthinking Capital, BlueRun Ventures, Xianghe Capital, Yunjiu Capital, Xiaohongshu, China Merchants Capital Fund, Qiqi Interactive Entertainment Venture Capital Fund, High-Rong Venture Capital, IDG Capital, Kaihui Capital, Ji’an Medical, Wuyuan Capital, and others.

According to information in the Tianyancha App, Kimi has not yet disclosed the ownership percentages held by its investors. Currently, founder and CEO Yang Zhulin holds 78.968%, giving him absolute control. Zhou Xinyu holds 10%, and Wu Yuxin holds 5.957%. In addition, Yang Zhulin’s fellow alumnus and senior classmate Zhang Yutao holds 5%, and the final 0.075% shares are held by Wang Zhen.

Under the “raising lobsters” boom, it becomes red-hot again: orders surge 80x, and revenue in 20 days exceeds all of last year

Behind the dense financing and the blowout valuation increase is inseparable from Kimi’s own quality.

In October 2023, at this communication meeting, Yang Zhulin mentioned that the current situation—where the input length of large models is generally low—places very great constraints on its technology becoming truly usable on the ground. For example: in today’s popular virtual character scenarios, because of insufficient long-text capability, virtual characters will easily forget important information. In Character AI’s community, users often complain that “after many rounds of conversation the character forgets its own identity, so they have to restart a new conversation,” and there are other similar issues like these.

Kimi also observed the application difficulties brought by “limitations on large-model input length.” As Yang Zhulin explained, to address this, the company achieved “the world’s longest—supporting ultra-long input of 200,000 words—bringing large-model products into the long-text era.”

While delivering its debut with震撼 technology, Yang Zhulin also released the intelligent assistant product Kimi Chat (Kimi’s early name). In March 2024, Kimi expanded lossless context length from 200,000 words to 2 million words and launched a beta test. Due to a surge in traffic, the system went down, and it responded with five emergency expansions. Its ranking on the free chart jumped from 436th in January 2024 to 11th in March, and also drove up “Kimi concept stocks.”

It is worth noting that after entering 2025, with DeepSeek booming and Doubao rising, plus strong promotion of products such as Yuanbao, to a certain extent they diverted users’ attention. In December 2025, Kimi’s weekly active user count fell to 4.5 million, and its ranking dropped to 7th in the industry.

However, Kimi still strongly fought back with solid capability. At the end of January this year, Kimi officially released its next-generation open-source model K2.5. As Kimi’s most intelligent model, K2.5 achieved the best results among global open-source models across multiple agent (intelligent agent) evaluations, such as HLE (Human Last Exam), BrowseComp (web retrieval benchmark for large models), and DeepSearchQA (a difficult benchmark).

Kimi K2.5 is an all-purpose model. Built on a native multimodal architecture design, it supports visual and text inputs, integrating visual understanding and reasoning, programming, Agent, and other capabilities into a single model. Yang Zhulin said, “We rebuilt the reinforcement learning infrastructure, and specifically optimized the training algorithms to ensure it reaches extreme efficiency and performance.”

Prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya even framed this as a “Kimi K2.5 moment”—the first time an open-source model truly shook the closed-source ecosystem built by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google at the level of comprehensive capabilities. Looking back through history, technological turning points often also become the starting point of commercial takeoff.

Users also chose to come back. According to Stripe data, a global payments giant, the number of subscription payment orders for Kimi increased by 8,280% month-over-month in January, and rose another 123.8% month-over-month in February. On its global payments leaderboard, in just two months Kimi’s rank jumped from outside the top 100 to 9th. In the domestic market, Kimi.com’s website views in February this year also reached an all-time high.

Meanwhile, at a time when open-source AI agent OpenClaw (lobster) is booming, it unexpectedly also became an assist for Kimi to go viral again. In early February, OpenClaw announced that it would set Kimi K2.5 as its official main model, directly triggering explosive growth for Kimi.

Not only that: Kimi also launched a cloud-hosted OpenClaw product, Kimi Claw, on February 18, supporting deployment directly inside Kimi. Its main features include lower usage costs and a lower technical barrier. It is not an independent new product; rather, it is a cloud-hosting service based on the open-source framework OpenClaw, mainly simplifying the deployment process.

Since late January, driven by the dual impact of the explosive popularity of the Kimi K2.5 model and Kimi Claw, Kimi has reportedly accumulated revenue in nearly 20 days that has already exceeded the entire year of 2025.

For its development targets in 2026, Yang Zhulin also mentioned in a public letter at the end of 2025: “Achieve order-of-magnitude growth in revenue scale. For products and commercialization, focus on Agents. Not aiming for an absolute number of users, but pursuing the intelligent upper limit and creating greater value in productivity.” Whether it can be achieved remains to be tested by time.