The Chinese AI provider Moonshot AI is preparing an IPO in Hong Kong and has sent shareholders a resolution proposal. The news agency Bloomberg reported this, citing people familiar with the matter. The ongoing funding round values the company at over $30 billion, a jump from around $20 billion in May.
Kimi K3 Drives Annual Revenue to $300 Million
The basis for the planned IPO is the success of the open language model Kimi K3, which Moonshot released in mid-July. Recurring annual revenue climbed to around $300 million by June, up from $200 million in April and about $100 million in March – a tripling within a few months. Moonshot generates revenue through tiered chatbot subscriptions, a separately billed API, and the Kimi Work agent platform for office tasks.
Demand exceeded the company’s own expectations so sharply that Moonshot temporarily stopped accepting new Kimi K3 subscriptions, as beckmann.ai reported. According to the company, daily sales rose sixfold since launch, and existing graphics processors hit their capacity limits. The targeted valuation of over $30 billion would be nearly seven times the $4.3 billion at which Moonshot was valued last December; this figure is not independently verified. In May, a funding round led by Meituan had valued the company at just $20 billion, less than three months earlier.
CICC and Goldman Sachs Set to Arrange the Listing
For the planned listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Moonshot is reportedly negotiating with investment banks China International Capital Corporation and Goldman Sachs over their role as underwriters. The IPO could take place within six months. To meet requirements from China’s securities regulator, the CSRC, for overseas listings, the company is also dismantling its existing offshore structure, a so-called red-chip structure, and switching to a joint-venture model. Such a restructuring is generally seen as a prerequisite for smooth approval by exchange regulators and typically takes several months of lead time.
Moonshot AI was founded in early 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former computer science lecturer at Tsinghua University who had previously worked at Meta and Google. According to the company, Kimi K3 processes 2.8 trillion parameters and has a context window of up to one million tokens. The model outperforms every rival model except Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol on several benchmarks, according to the analysis platform Artificial Analysis, and leads particularly on programming tasks. As an open model, Kimi K3 can also be run locally, making it attractive to companies with their own computing infrastructure.
Chinese AI Firms Push Toward Stock Listings Together
Moonshot is not the only Chinese AI company with IPO plans. Rival DeepSeek is reportedly preparing a funding round at a valuation of roughly $73.8 billion and is targeting its own IPO in 2027. Z.AI is approaching $1 billion in annual revenue according to industry estimates, keeping it ahead of Moonshot. Hong Kong has recently established itself as the preferred listing venue for Chinese technology firms, as listings in the United States have become more politically fraught.
Kimi K3’s launch had already briefly pressured semiconductor stocks last week and contributed to a sell-off on the Nasdaq, which beckmann.ai already reported. The near-simultaneous launch of Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 model further intensified competitive pressure and fueled doubts in financial markets about the cost leadership of Western providers. For Moonshot’s planned listing, this attention is likely an additional selling point with investors, even though inexpensive Chinese models have already triggered short-term price swings for US chipmakers multiple times before.
It remains to be seen whether Moonshot can dismantle its offshore structure in time within the targeted six months, and whether Hong Kong’s exchange regulator sticks to that timeline. The next concrete step is the shareholder vote on the submitted resolution proposal; no date for that has been announced yet.
