(Yicai) July 30 -- Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi chatbot, secured more than USD3.5 billion in its latest funding round, exceeding expectations and lifting its valuation to USD35 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The investor enthusiasm is largely attributed to strong interest in its Kimi K3 model in Silicon Valley.

Moonshot AI has been active in fundraising this year, with its valuation rising from USD10 billion to USD35 billion in just a few months. And the Beijing-based firm is already seeking another round of financing at a pre-investment valuation of approximately USD50 billion, the sources said yesterday.

As of press time, the company had not responded to requests for comment on its latest fundraising plans.

Moonshot AI released the model weights and technical report for Kimi K3 on the global open-source platform Hugging Face on the evening of July 27. Kimi K3 is a 2.5-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model featuring native visual understanding and a one-million-token context window.

In addition to its technical capabilities, Kimi K3’s pricing has also drawn attention. The model’s prices for non-cached input and output have increased to USD3 and USD15 per million tokens, respectively, while cached input is priced at USD0.30 per million tokens, a significant increase from the pricing of the earlier K2.6 model.

Kimi K3’s standard pricing is identical to Claude Sonnet 5’s regular rates after promotional discounts expire, according to Huafu Securities. It is 50 percent higher than the current promotional price of Sonnet 5, 40 percent lower than Claude Opus 4.8 and 70 percent lower than Fable 5, placing Kimi K3’s pricing broadly in line with the market’s top-tier models.

Editor: Kim Taylor