Kimi's latest valuation exceeds $10 billion: The valuation growth rate has surpassed that of ByteDance and Pinduoduo, and its revenue soared during the Spring Festival.

According to IPO Early Know, just over a month after completing the previous round of financing of $500 million, the parent company of Kimi, Moonshot AI, is about to complete the full delivery of a new round of financing exceeding $700 million, with over - subscription achieved. This round of financing is jointly led by Alibaba, Tencent, Wuyuan, Jiuan, etc. Old shareholders such as Gao Rong Venture Capital have continued to increase their investment. After this round of financing, the company's valuation exceeds $10 billion.

It is worth mentioning that Kimi's consecutive two - round financing of over $1.2 billion has set the highest financing record in the large - model industry in the past year. In fact, as this round of financing is about to be completed, Kimi has already started a new round of financing with a valuation of $10 - 12 billion and has received investment intentions from multiple institutions, including some European - background institutions that rarely invested in Chinese technology companies before.

In addition, Kimi has also set the fastest growth rate for a domestic company to become a "centicorn" (valued at over $10 billion). It took ByteDance more than four years to break through the $10 - billion valuation mark, and Pinduoduo also took over three years. However, Kimi, which was founded in 2023, took only a little over two years to grow from a $300 - million valuation in the angel round to over $10 billion now.

The cumulative revenue in the past 20 days has exceeded the total annual revenue of 2025, and there has been a structural reversal in revenue, with overseas revenue surpassing domestic revenue.

A set of figures worthy of attention is that the $10 - billion valuation has actually exceeded the IPO issuance market values of Zhipu and MiniMax at the beginning of this year.

Undoubtedly, Kimi's current high popularity in the primary market is, to some extent, due to Zhipu and MiniMax repeatedly hitting new highs in the secondary market, with their market values once both exceeding HK$300 billion. Investors' FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has reached a new peak.

From this perspective, on the one hand, the valuation of $10 - 12 billion still offers considerable cost - effectiveness compared to the secondary market; on the other hand, during these two rounds of Kimi's financing, these institutions actually had enough time and ability to directly buy the stocks of Zhipu and MiniMax. The reason they are still willing to heavily invest in Kimi is essentially because of their long - term optimism about Kimi's fundamentals and their confidence in its explosively growing financial data.

On January 27th, Kimi released and open - sourced the Kimi K2.5 model. This is not only Kimi's most intelligent model to date, achieving state - of - the - art performance in open - source on Agent, code, image, video, and a series of general intelligent tasks; it is also Kimi's most versatile model, with a native multi - modal architecture design, supporting both visual and text input, thinking and non - thinking modes, as well as dialogue and Agent tasks.

According to data from OpenRouter, the call volume of Kimi K2.5 has consistently led and ranked first on OpenClaw's model call list.

In addition, the Agent swarm function launched by K2.5 can schedule up to 100 agent avatars, process 1,500 steps in parallel, and complete more complex tasks, making the era of single agents a thing of the past.

More notably, less than a month after the release of the K2.5 large model, Kimi's cumulative revenue in the past 20 days has exceeded the total annual revenue of 2025. The growth is mainly driven by a significant increase in global paying users and API call volume. Moreover, there has been a structural reversal in Kimi's revenue after the release of K2.5, with overseas revenue surpassing domestic revenue.

Not in a hurry to go public in the short term, keep the initiative in its own hands, and prefer to explore a new relationship between technology and capital in the primary market.

On the last day of 2025, Kimi's founder and CEO, Yang Zhilin, mentioned in an internal letter to all employees that "the company's financing amount exceeds most IPO fund - raisings and private placements of listed companies, and we can still raise a larger amount of funds from the primary market. So we are not in a hurry to go public in the short term. Of course, in the future, we plan to use going public as a means to accelerate AGI and act at the right time, with the initiative in our hands."

Obviously, Kimi hopes to explore a new relationship between technology and capital in the primary market. After all, Kimi's financing ability in the primary market is equal to or even surpasses the public - offering ability of many companies. For Kimi, an IPO is more of a "icing on the cake." It can even be expected that when Kimi finally goes public one day, its valuation may have greater room for imagination.

In Yang Zhilin's vision, Kimi's most important goal in the future is to surpass cutting - edge companies like Anthropic and become a world - leading AGI company.

Yang Zhilin pointed out in the aforementioned internal letter that the strategy for 2026 will be promoted in the following aspects: 1. Through technological improvements and further scaling, the K3 model will increase the equivalent FLOPs by at least an order of magnitude, catching up with the world's leading models in the pre - training level; 2. Vertically integrate model training and agent product taste to make the K3 model more "unique" and enable users to experience new capabilities not defined by other models; 3. Focus on agents in product development and commercialization. Instead of aiming for an absolute number of users, continuously pursue the upper limit of intelligence, create greater productivity value, and achieve an order - of - magnitude increase in revenue scale.

Judging from the fact that less than two months have passed in 2026, Kimi's expectations are being exceeded. First, Kimi's revenue has witnessed explosive growth; second, nearly two weeks after K2.5 launched the Agent swarm function, Claude also launched this function. In other words, Kimi is leading new trends in AI development such as cluster - type Agents.

This article is from the WeChat official account "IPO Early Know" (ID: ipozaozhidao), written by Stone Jin and published by 36Kr with authorization.