Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI has raised about US$2 billion in a new funding round, boosting its valuation to more than US$20 billion as it navigates Beijing’s new listing rules for companies registered overseas.

The funding was led by Meituan and involved China Mobile. Over the past six months, Moonshot had raised a total of US$3.9 billion, according to a statement by the deal’s financial adviser HF Capital on Thursday.

The Beijing-based company, best known for its Kimi chatbot, saw its annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceed US$200 million in April, the statement said. ARR is used to project a firm’s 12-month revenue by extrapolating earnings from a shorter period, like a month or a quarter. US AI start-up Anthropic’s ARR recently crossed US$30 billion.

Moonshot’s valuation of US$20 billion “still has significant room for growth” as the market caps of its Hong Kong-listed peers Zhipu AI, traded as Knowledge Atlas Technology, and MiniMax, were much higher, according to HF Capital. The market caps of Zhipu AI and MiniMax stood at HK$434.7 billion (US$55.5 billion) and HK$257 billion, respectively, on Thursday.

The funding came as Moonshot, whose assets were held by a parent registered in the Cayman Islands, is pursuing a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) under the latest rules implemented by Beijing, according to a source close to the company.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission has advised firms with offshore holding entities to restructure and pursue listings through their mainland entities instead. Where offshore structures are retained, the market regulator requires companies to justify their necessity.

Moonshot was considering unwinding the structure to list in Hong Kong, but it had not arrived at a decision, the source said. Similarly, peer StepFun was unwinding its structure to pave the way for a Hong Kong IPO, according to a Reuters report last month.

Moonshot did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin indicated late last year that the company was in no rush to pursue an IPO. In a letter to employees, Yang said Moonshot could still “raise a substantially large amount of capital from the primary market”.

The firm’s latest financing underscores continued investor appetite for Chinese companies developing frontier AI models capable of competing with US rivals.

The company continues to push model development and commercialisation.

In April, it released Kimi K2.6, upgrading capabilities in coding, long-context reasoning, task execution and multi-agent orchestration. Following the launch, the company raised Kimi’s application programming interface (API) input pricing from US$0.60 to US$0.95 per million tokens, an increase of nearly 60 per cent and the first pricing adjustment since the K2 series debuted.

The strong model performance and expanding product ecosystem have translated into rapid user and revenue growth.

Data from payments platform Stripe showed that after revenue growth accelerated in late January, Kimi generated more revenue over one 20-day stretch than during the whole of 2025. The number of paid subscriptions surged more than 8,000 per cent month on month in January and rose a further 120 per cent in February.

Kimi K2.6 recorded 1.79 trillion token usage over the past week, ranking second globally by total API call volume on the platform, according to data from OpenRouter, a unified API marketplace and gateway that allows developers and users to access hundreds of different large language models.

Moonshot AI’s fundraising comes as China’s AI sector enters a new phase of capital competition. DeepSeek has begun seeking external funding after years of relying on support from founder Liang Wenfeng’s hedge fund High-Flyer.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that DeepSeek could be valued at as much as US$50 billion after its first external fundraising round, as the Hangzhou-based company reverses its long-standing strategy of rejecting outside capital.