JAKARTA - Moonshot AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi chatbot, has raised more than 3.5 billion US dollars in its latest funding round. The company's value has now jumped to 35 billion US dollars.
Yicai Global, quoted on Friday, July 31, reported that the funding figure exceeded expectations. Investor enthusiasm is said to be triggered by the great interest in the Kimi K3 model in Silicon Valley.
Moonshot AI is one of China's most aggressive AI startups looking for funding this year. Its valuation has risen rapidly, from 10 billion US dollars to 35 billion US dollars in just a few months.
Yicai's source said the Beijing-based company was also seeking its next round of funding with a pre-investment valuation of around $50 billion.
However, as of Yicai's report, Moonshot AI has not responded to a request for comment regarding the latest fundraising plan.
Kimi is a major name in the Chinese AI chatbot competition. Now, investor attention is turning to Kimi K3, the latest model that has started to be talked about in the United States technology circles.
Moonshot AI released the model weights and Kimi K3 technical report on Hugging Face on the night of July 27. Hugging Face is a global platform that many developers use to share artificial intelligence models, data, and tools.
Kimi K3 is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.5 trillion parameters. Simply put, mixture-of-experts is an approach that uses multiple parts of a specialized model to handle a specific task, so that processing can be more efficient.
Parameters are a measure of the ability of an AI model to recognize patterns from the data it has learned. The larger the number of parameters, the greater the capacity of the model, although performance still depends on its design and training method.
Kimi K3 also comes with the ability to understand visuals natively. This model has a one million token context window.
Tokens are pieces of text that the AI model processes. A context window of one million tokens means the model can read and process very long inputs in one session.
In addition to technical capabilities, the price of Kimi K3 also attracts attention. The price of non-cache input and output rises to 3 US dollars and 15 US dollars per one million tokens, respectively.
Cache input is priced at 0.30 US dollars per one million tokens. This price is significantly higher than the previous K2.6 model.
Non-cache input means that the model has to process new data from scratch. Cache input is data that has already been stored or processed so that it costs less.
According to Huafu Securities, the standard price of Kimi K3 is the same as the regular rate of Claude Sonnet 5 after the promotional discount ends.
The price of Kimi K3 is also 50 percent higher than the current Sonnet 5 promotional price. However, the price is still 40 percent lower than the Claude Opus 4.8 and 70 percent lower than Fable 5.
With this position, the K3 Kimi is in the price range of the top AI model. Moonshot AI has not responded to Yicai's request for comment regarding its latest funding plan.
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