By Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI has taken a major step towards the public markets, confidentially filing for a Hong Kong initial public offering that could raise about $3 billion, sources told Reuters on Thursday.
The Beijing-based company, best known for its Kimi chatbot and large language models, submitted the filing as competition for capital intensifies among China’s fast-growing AI developers.
TechNode separately reported that Moonshot had lodged a confidential A1 application with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week.
A successful deal would put Moonshot alongside Zhipu AI and MiniMax, which listed in Hong Kong earlier this year, and deepen the city’s role as the preferred fundraising venue for China’s new generation of AI companies.
Moonshot’s valuation has raced ahead of its IPO plans
The proposed listing comes after a striking acceleration in Moonshot’s private-market valuation.
In May, the company raised about $2 billion at a valuation of roughly $20 billion, with the round led by Meituan’s venture arm Long-Z Investments.
As per reports, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue had exceeded $200 million in April, supported by paid subscriptions and API demand.
By July, a later financing valued the company at around $30 billion, while subsequent fundraising discussions were targeting a valuation of as much as $50 billion, the South China Morning Post reported in August.
That rapid repricing gives Moonshot a powerful fundraising narrative, but it also raises the expectations attached to any public offering.
Investors will want evidence that revenue can keep expanding fast enough to support a valuation built heavily on future growth.
Kimi K3 has changed perceptions of Chinese AI
Moonshot’s IPO push has gathered momentum since the release of Kimi K3, its latest open-weight model.
The model has performed strongly against leading US systems on several benchmarks, helping challenge the idea that China remains many months behind the US at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that the technology gap had narrowed to a matter of weeks rather than months.
The commercial implications may be just as important.
Saxo Markets chief investment strategist Charu Chanana told Bloomberg that capable, lower-cost open models could reduce the cost of developing AI applications and accelerate adoption across areas including coding, customer service and industrial workflows.
Hong Kong is becoming a home for China’s AI listings
Moonshot is entering a market that has already shown strong appetite for AI offerings.
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing said AI-related companies raised $4.9 billion across December and January, including $558 million by Zhipu AI and $711 million by MiniMax.
The exchange said in February that about 20 companies across the AI value chain were in its listing pipeline.
That backdrop should support Moonshot’s fundraising ambitions, but public investors have also become more selective as valuations climb and competition intensifies.
Moonshot’s IPO will therefore show whether public markets are prepared to place a multibillion-dollar bet on Kimi’s ability to turn technical momentum into durable revenue growth.
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