BEIJING, February 7 (TMTPOST)— Moonshot AI, a prominent player in the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI), has declined to confirm or deny the truthfulness of $200 million financing round with participation of Alibaba and Ant Group,
Founded in March 2023, Moonshot AI has focused on harnessing energy to achieve optimal solutions in the AGI domain. In October 2023, the company unveiled the world's first intelligent assistant product, Kimi AI (formerly known as Kimi Chat), capable of processing input in 200,000 Chinese characters, alongside the Moonshot Open Platform. Notably, the recent success of the popular gaming app "Honghong Simulator" has been attributed to Moonshot AI's technological support.
Public information shows that Moonshot AI's founder, Yang Zhilin, holds a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science and Technology and a doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, a leading institution in natural language processing. Yang is a co-founder of Recurrent AI.
As of now, Moonshot AI employs fewer than 200 people.
Regarding financing, Yang disclosed in October 2023 that the company had secured nearly two billion yuan (US$280 million) in investments from investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Qiming Capital, and GGV Capital.
Last December, China Merchants Fund announced an agreement to purchase preferred shares and other relevant agreements with Moonshot AI through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Minxing Investment Ltd., committing $10 million to participate in the company's Round-A financing.
According to reports from AI Tech Review, Moonshot AI is currently undergoing a $200 million fundraising round, with joint investments from Ant Group and Alibaba Group, valuing the company at an estimated $1.5 billion. This development positions Moonshot AI as a unicorn in the AI sector.
Furthermore, it is anticipated that Moonshot AI will launch a new model comparable to GPT-4 next month, seamlessly integrating it into Kimi AI and simultaneously releasing two related applications.