Kimi is striving to achieve an annual sales revenue of 2 billion US dollars and preparing for a Hong Kong IPO with a valuation of 50 billion US dollars.
The star artificial intelligence firm Moonshot AI, developer of Kimi, is accelerating its sprint toward an annualized revenue target of $2 billion by the end of 2026. Driven by the breakout success of its Kimi K3 model, the company is mounting greater pressure on rivals including Anthropic and Zhipu AI.
According to people familiar with the matter, Moonshot AI recently informed investors that its annual recurring revenue (ARR, a metric for measuring future sales) surpassed $1 billion in August, up from just $300 million in June. This growth is largely fueled by the Kimi K3 large AI model launched in July — the model ranks at the top of performance benchmarks while carrying costs far lower than top-tier U.S. competitors.
The startup expects its sales to double again as consumers and enterprises show growing interest in Kimi's subscription services and models, according to insiders. Internal forecasts of the company put its annual sales at $2 billion by the end of the year.
Moonshot AI is raising funding at a valuation of roughly $50 billion, roughly on par with the current market value of Zhipu AI, and plans to conduct an initial public offering in Hong Kong as early as this year. Its rapid growth highlights how a hit model can drastically elevate the prospects of an AI lab.
The debut of Kimi K3 has drawn global attention and proven the success of Moonshot AI's ambitious plan to build an ultra-large AI model with 2.8 trillion parameters. The expanded parameter scale has helped Moonshot AI stand out in the fiercely competitive AI space, where U.S. players such as OpenAI dominate the high-end market, while Chinese rivals including DeepSeek compete on price advantages.
Moonshot AI is quickly emerging as a formidable rival to listed peers such as Zhipu AI's Z.ai and MiniMax Group. MiniMax stated that its annual recurring revenue hit $800 million in August. Zhipu's annualized sales soared to $1.6 billion in July after breaking the $1 billion threshold earlier that month.
Chinese AI developers still lag behind leading U.S. labs in terms of revenue. By mid-2026, Anthropic and OpenAI will reach annualized revenue of $650 billion and $400 billion respectively. Regardless of revenue figures, AI labs around the world face a longstanding concern from investors: whether their massive investments in hardware and infrastructure can ultimately deliver lucrative returns.
Moonshot AI initially found success among programmers and individual entrepreneurs, but now the firm is targeting larger enterprise clients to drive future growth. The startup recently assembled a team of engineers to help clients including AsiaInfo Technologies and Kingsoft Cloud Holdings deploy its AI models.
Additional sales could come from cloud service providers. The licensing agreement for Kimi K3 requires that if a company hosts the model for commercial purposes and its cumulative 12-month revenue exceeds $20 million, it must sign a separate agreement with Moonshot AI. Reuters reported last month that the startup is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet) to secure a 30% revenue share.
Domestic Chinese AI startups have had to navigate persistent external scrutiny of their technical capabilities. Moonshot AI and its domestic peers face allegations of illegal "distillation" from top U.S. labs — the practice of extracting outputs from more powerful AI models to train smaller models.
This week, Anthropic accused Moonshot AI of secretly routing user requests to its Claude model and passing off the responses as its own. Anthropic stated it believes those responses were used to train the startup's software.
This article is sourced from the WeChat Official Account "Tech Business", and 36Kr publishes it with authorization.