It has denied the IPO, but the listing window will not wait long for Moonshot AI.
On August 3, IFR, a subsidiary of Reuters, reported that Moonshot AI, a domestic Chinese large AI model company, plans to submit an IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as early as this month, with a proposed fundraising of about 3 billion US dollars. The news quickly hit the headlines of major financial media. Subsequently, Moonshot AI responded to multiple media outlets: the news is not true.
If you only look at this round of denial, the story ends here. But another set of information in the industrial and commercial registration system tells a different version: less than a week before the rumors fermented, on July 29, Tianyancha showed that Moonshot AI completed the industrial and commercial change registration, and the company name was changed from "Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd." to "Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. (Joint Stock Limited)", and the enterprise type was transformed into a joint stock limited company.
Shareholding system reform has always been regarded as a key pre-step for enterprises to prepare for IPO. The management restructuring was also completed simultaneously: founder Yang Zhilin served as the chairman and manager of the company, Zhou Xinyu served as a director, Zhang Yutong was newly appointed as a director, and Song Sijia served as the person in charge of finance. Public information shows that the company currently has 13 shareholders, with Yang Zhilin holding 51.83% of the shares, maintaining absolute controlling stake; among institutional shareholders, the Social Security Fund Yangtze River Delta Science and Technology Innovation Fund is present, holding about 4% of the shares. According to another media report in May, Moonshot AI has notified shareholders to start the adjustment of VIE and red-chip structures to clear obstacles for listing in Hong Kong — from the current industrial and commercial registration information, it is not yet possible to confirm whether all relevant adjustments have been completed.
01
From "No Rush" to "Catching the Listing Window"
Let's go back eight months. At the end of 2025, Yang Zhilin made it very clear in the internal company-wide letter: "There is no rush to go public in the short term. The initiative in the future is in our own hands." At that time, Moonshot AI had just completed its Series C financing, with more than 10 billion yuan in cash on its books.
The change in attitude took place in the first half of 2026. The acceleration of this shift came from two directions.
One direction is peers. In January this year, Zhipu AI and MiniMax successively landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, winning the titles of "the world's first large model stock" and the second one — both using the channel opened by Chapter 18C of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for special technology companies. After listing, the stock prices of the two companies once surged, with Zhipu AI's market cap peaking at 1.39 trillion Hong Kong dollars and MiniMax's market cap reaching 460 billion Hong Kong dollars, and then they quickly launched the process of A-share listing. According to public disclosures, Zhipu AI completed the placement in July, with a net fundraising of 31.375 billion Hong Kong dollars; MiniMax completed the placement and bond issuance with a total amount of 160 billion Hong Kong dollars. Competitors in the same track have already reaped the dividends of the capital market.
The other direction is Moonshot AI's own growth engine. On July 16, Kimi K3 was officially released: with a total parameter of 2.8 trillion, adopting an 896-select-16 ultra-sparse MoE architecture, supporting a 1 million token context window, and having native visual understanding capability, it is the open-source model with the largest parameter scale in the world. A few hours after its release, it topped the Frontend Code Arena list with a score of 1679, winning 6 first places in 7 frontend sub-fields; it ranked third in the comprehensive intelligence score of Artificial Analysis, second only to the Claude and GPT series. Only 48 hours after the release, the surging volume of user requests approached the carrying limit of the company's existing cluster, forcing Moonshot AI to announce the suspension of new C-end user subscriptions to give priority to computing power for paying users. On July 27, the company open-sourced the model weights, technical report and key Infra technologies of K3 as scheduled.
The explosive popularity of the technology directly brought the computing power problem to the forefront. Some industry observers analyzed that the leading time of a model in the large model field on the leaderboard has been shortened from several months in the past to several weeks, while the primary market often takes several months from due diligence to fund transfer — to lock in long-term computing power infrastructure, the financing speed of the secondary market can match this urgency. This constitutes the core logic behind Moonshot AI's attitude change: it is not that the company is short of money, but that it needs to convert technical momentum into capital momentum within the window of technological leadership.
02
The Kimi K3 Engine
What gives Moonshot AI the confidence to make the shift is the dual technical and commercial verification brought by K3.
Apart from the technical level, what is more noteworthy is the change in commercial data. According to the company's disclosure and public reports, Moonshot AI's annual recurring revenue (ARR) achieved a "triple jump" in 2026: exceeding 100 million US dollars in March, exceeding 200 million US dollars in May, and exceeding 300 million US dollars in mid-June. Zhang Yutong, the president, disclosed on the day of K3's launch that the company's ARR recorded the largest single-day increase in history; on July 18, she stated again that "the enterprise ARR has achieved several times of growth" — however, this statement did not disclose the statistical period, absolute amount and specific business caliber, and its actual meaning remains to be further explained by the company. From the perspective of revenue structure, API revenue accounts for more than 70% of the total revenue, and the company has moved from relying on C-end subscriptions to the stage of large-scale monetization on the B-end.
K3's pricing power has also been tested. Its API output is priced at 15 US dollars per million tokens, nearly 4 times higher than the 4 US dollars of the previous generation K2.6, and paid subscriptions were sold out within 48 hours of launch — users are willing to pay a premium for a better model. Kimi's personal subscription payment once even rushed to the 9th place on Stripe's global list.
The reaction of the global market is equally drastic. Within 72 hours after the release of K3, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell by 12.5% for the week, and heavyweight stocks such as NVIDIA, Meta, and Google were under pressure, with the total market value of the US stock AI sector evaporating by about 470 billion US dollars. It should be noted that this is an attribution that foreign media generally linked the current tech stock sell-off to the release of K3. The market calls this scene the "Kimi Moment", which is comparable to the shock caused by DeepSeek last year — the attribution itself is a media observation, not a strict causal conclusion. In the same period, the stock prices of Zhipu AI and MiniMax on the Hong Kong stock market also dropped significantly on the day of K3's release.
03
The Other Side of Valuation
The enthusiasm of the capital market is directly written on the valuation curve.
According to media reports, Moonshot AI completed its Series F financing on July 29, with a scale of more than 3.5 billion US dollars, and the post-investment valuation reached 35 billion US dollars; due to strong institutional subscription willingness, this round of financing closed early with a scale more than three times the target amount. Subsequently, the Pre-IPO round of financing was launched in advance, with a pre-investment valuation of about 50 billion US dollars. According to the report of IPO Early Know, the round has notified intended investors that the final closing will be completed on August 27. It should be pointed out that all the above financing information comes from media reports or insiders, and Moonshot AI has not officially announced it yet.
If this set of data is true, Moonshot AI's valuation trajectory is extremely steep: the post-Series C valuation at the end of 2025 was 4.3 billion US dollars, it rose to 20 billion US dollars after the Series D in May 2026, and now it is 35 billion US dollars — an increase of more than 7 times in more than half a year. But another set of figures provides a calm reference: based on the rumored pre-investment valuation of 50 billion US dollars and the publicly disclosed 300 million US dollars ARR of the company, the price-to-sales ratio is about 167 times; while the price-to-sales ratio of overseas leading companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic is generally in the range of 20 to 40 times. This gap means that the current pricing includes a very high expectation premium, and the company needs to prove that revenue growth can catch up with valuation expansion within a visible period of time.
The stock price trajectory of the forerunners is another dose of cold water. Zhipu AI's stock price has fallen back to less than one third of its peak of 2980 Hong Kong dollars, and MiniMax's stock price has also fallen back to about one fifth of its peak; Zhipu AI will enter the share lock-up expiration period in January 2027. Some institutions judge accordingly that if the supply of AI targets in the Hong Kong stock market continues to increase and the revenue growth of enterprises fails to match the valuation, the valuation multiple given by the market may gradually fall back. Some institutions participating in the transaction believe that the ideal listing window for Moonshot AI is from the end of 2026 to the first quarter of 2027 — this is also the time logic behind the expectation of "submitting the application before September 30" reported by IPO Early Know.
04
A Race Against Time
The window is narrowing not only on the capital market side, but also on the technology side.
K3's competitors are catching up: although the official version of DeepSeek-V4 was once delayed, there have been recent news of internal testing, and the industry expects it to be released in mid-August; the preview version of Qwen3.8-Max from Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen team has been unveiled, with a total parameter of 2.4 trillion, also supporting a 1 million token context window; while praising Kimi K3 as "impressive", Elon Musk announced that xAI is training a new model with 2 trillion parameters, saying that it is expected to surpass Kimi. The technological leadership in the large model industry is being counted in units of "weeks".
The scrutiny of security research also creates great pressure. In early August, some researchers published a blog post saying that Kimi K3 was found to have a sandbox vulnerability in controlled tests and used it to access GitHub on the open Internet — the researchers also pointed out that models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have recently "escaped" the test environment in different ways, which has become a common control challenge faced by cutting-edge models.
The internal letter "no rush to go public" eight months ago, together with today's shareholding system reform and Pre-IPO closing, outlines a company's re-judgment of the industry rhythm. When peers have already landed on the market, competitors are approaching, and the shelf life of technological leadership is calculated in weeks, the optimal solution for the phrase "the initiative is in our hands" may be exactly to convert the initiative into capital when it is at its peak.
As for the authenticity of the submission timetable, the final landing point of the valuation, and when this "denied IPO" will be officially announced — all rumors and denials will eventually be verified by a prospectus.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Bowang Finance", author: Bishan, published with authorization from 36Kr.