Moonshot AI Closes Final Private Round at ~$50B, Eyes $5B Hong Kong IPO in Q1 2027

What Happened

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports Moonshot AI has closed its final private fundraising round at about $50 billion and is heading straight for a Hong Kong IPO in Q1 2027, targeting a raise of up to $5 billion. The company has begun sounding out investor sentiment, with pre-IPO meetings starting as early as this month. The banking lineup is set: Bank of America as overall coordinator, with CICC, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs as joint sponsors; the company has filed confidentially. Moonshot did not respond to requests for comment during China's public holiday.

The summer round valued the company at $31.5 billion, so the valuation is up nearly 60% in two months. Bloomberg previously reported annualized revenue of about $300 million in June; after Kimi K3 launched in July, it topped $1 billion in August, with an internal target of $2 billion by December.

Key Facts

1. Two months, +60%: $31.5B → $50B: The summer round was $31.5 billion; this one is $50 billion. ARR over the same period: $300M in June → $1B+ in August → $2B targeted by December. All these figures come from people familiar with the matter — the company has never publicly disclosed financials.
2. K3: July's open-weight model: Kimi K3, released in July, is a native multimodal open-weight model with roughly 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window. TechCrunch, citing OpenRouter data, says K3-family models serve about 300 billion tokens a day.
3. IPO lineup: BofA coordinating, CICC/DB/GS joint sponsors, filed confidentially: At $5 billion, it would be one of Hong Kong's largest AI IPOs in recent years. Hong Kong AI fundraising has already set records this year.
4. A regulatory data-security probe: The Information previously reported that regulators opened a data-security probe into DeepSeek and Moonshot. Bloomberg flags this uncertainty in its own report: whether the probe affects the valuation or the listing timeline is not yet known.
5. Same week, DeepSeek is raising at least $12B too: Also per Bloomberg (via Reuters, October 6), DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan (~$12 billion), with Tencent and CATL among the largest backers; the company originally sought 50 billion yuan, but investors added more after the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash launch, and the final tally could approach 100 billion yuan.

Context

Moonshot was founded in early 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua professor who previously worked at Meta and Google, and is backed by Alibaba, Tencent, 5Y Capital and others. After K3's July launch, Caixin's cover story called it the "Kimi Moment": an open-weight model approaching OpenAI and Anthropic on some metrics at a fraction of the cost. Monetization includes enterprise deployments (customers include AsiaInfo Technologies and Kingsoft Cloud), separate commercial agreements for model-as-a-service businesses earning over $20 million, and revenue-sharing talks of up to 30% with Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, IDG and state-affiliated funds are on both DeepSeek's and Moonshot's cap tables.