Moonshot AI Lands $1 Billion in Funding for Large Language Model Development

Moonshot AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has secured over $1 billion in a Series B funding round to support its development of large language models (LLMs). The funding, led by e-commerce giant Alibaba and VC firm HongShan, values the company at $2.5 billion. HongShan is the Chinese spin-off of US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital

Moonshot AI, also known as YueZhiAnMian in China, aims to tackle long-form context and response in LLMs, showcasing its capability by launching a 100 billion-parameter LLM and a chatbot named Kimi, which claims to process 200,000 Chinese characters in a single conversation.

Moonshot was founded in April 2023 by Yang Zhilin, who has degrees from  Tsinghua University as well as  Carnegie Mellon University.