Moonshot AI
startupMoonshot AI (named after the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon) is one of China's "AI Tigers" and its fastest-ever decacorn, founded in March 2023 by three Tsinghua classmates. CEO Yang Zhilin earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in under four years, co-authoring the highly influential Transformer-XL and XLNet papers while working with Google Brain and Meta FAIR.
Moonshot has raised over $2.7B across multiple rounds from HongShan (Sequoia China), Alibaba, Tencent, and others, reaching an $18B valuation in March 2026 — quadrupling in three months after the explosive launch of Kimi K2.5. Its consumer product Kimi pioneered long-context processing in Chinese AI, supporting 2M-token inputs. In fewer than 20 days after the K2.5 release, cumulative revenue exceeded the entire 2025 annual total.
In 2025, Moonshot shifted from proprietary to open-weight releases. Kimi-K2 (1T MoE, 32B active) was called "another DeepSeek moment" by Nature. The team has also contributed influential infrastructure including the Muon optimizer (2x more efficient than AdamW), MoBA (Mixture of Block Attention), and Mooncake (KVCache-centric serving, Best Paper at FAST 2025).
People
- Yang Zhilin OpenReview — Founder & CEO (formerly CMU PhD; Google Brain; Meta FAIR; Recurrent AI)
- Zhou Xinyu OpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Hulu; Tencent)
- Wu Yuxin — Co-founder (formerly Google Brain; Meta AI Research)
- Jianlin Su OpenReviewBlog (CN)Blog (EN) — Core Researcher (creator of RoPE)
- Flood Sung OpenReview — Former RL Lead (departed 2025) (formerly Founded XVI Robotics)