Chinese AI Firm Moonshot Aims for $18 Billion Valuation

Chinese startup Moonshot AI is reportedly looking to raise $1 billion in new funding.

That round would value the artificial intelligence company at $18 billion, more than four times its valuation from late last year, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (March 14), citing sources familiar with the matter.

Moonshot, which makes the Kimi chatbot, began talks about this new round after securing more than $700 million earlier this year, bringing its valuation to $10 billion. At the end of 2025, the company had been valued at $4.3 billion following a $500 million injection of funding, the sources told Bloomberg.

The report noted that the speed of Moonshot’s fundraising is a sign of increasing appetite among investors for Chinese startups that hope to compete with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. This frenzy was sparked by the rise of open-source agent OpenClaw, leading China’s top cloud providers and AI challengers to introduce their own versions.

Moonshot, Bloomberg added, was first among those to take advantage of the trend with the debut of Kimi Claw. After the rollout, Moonshot’s monthly sales surpassed its total revenue for the entirety of last year, according to one of the sources.

A separate report last week from the news outlet noted that Chinese tech giant Alibaba had introduced a mobile app to help users install OpenLaw and use it to deploy AI agents. Rival tech firm Baidu had introduced an Android app for OpenClaw earlier this week.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote last month that the arrival of OpenClaw demonstrated something enterprises can no longer hold off on addressing.

“An AI agent operating through APIs can browse the web, read email, access files, run software and initiate transactions without a human driving each step,” that report said. “It does not rely on interfaces designed for people. It interacts directly with programmatic endpoints. That is a different kind of software user, and it requires a different kind of software product.”

When an AI agent like OpenClaw browses the web, reads email, retrieves files or initiates a transaction, the report said, it doesn’t interact with graphic interfaces or dashboards built for human users.

“It calls endpoints. It authenticates. It executes instructions in structured formats. It sequences actions across domains, maintains state across sessions and adapts its next call based on prior responses. That change reframes what enterprise software is and who it is built for.”

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