Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI is an artificial intelligence company focused on developing large language models to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The company develops foundation models including the Kimi chatbot and open-source LLMs with long context capabilities.
Founding Story
Yang Zhilin co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 after a trip to the US in December 2022 to learn about GenAI applications and recruit talent for his AI venture. The company name 'Moonshot' comes from Pink Floyd's album 'Dark Side of the Moon.' Yang explained: 'For us, it's about exploring the unknown. Just like AGI, you usually only see the illuminated side of the moon, but the dark side remains mysterious. It's challenging, yet full of potential. That aligns with our mission.' Yang and his team describe themselves as 'stubborn AGI purists' who believe 'AGI is the only thing worth doing in the next decade' and that 'vision matters most.' Their vision was to develop a company that combines 'OpenAI's technology idealism with the business philosophy of ByteDance.' The three founders were schoolmates at Tsinghua University.
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Leadership
Founders
Yang Zhilin
Born 1992, earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University after graduating first in his class from Tsinghua University's Computer Science Department, completing PhD in under 4 years. Published over 20 influential papers in AI, collaborated with multiple Turing Award winners including Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Google research scientist Quoc V Le, and Yoshua Bengio. Worked at Facebook AI Research (Meta) and Google Brain during and after doctoral study. In 2020, worked with Huawei Technologies on Pangu AI model. In 2021, led team on Wudao LLM at Beijing Academy of AI. Was drummer in a band called Skip List. Founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 after trip to US in December 2022.
Zhou Xinyu
Graduated with Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University (2015). Worked as research intern at Tencent where he gained experience with large-scale machine learning and AI system deployment. Co-creator of ShuffleNet, a mobile-friendly CNN architecture that became instrumental in edge AI and vision applications, cited and deployed by industry giants like Apple.
Wu Yuxin
Obtained undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University (2015), then received master's in Computer Vision from Carnegie Mellon University. Worked at Google Brain on foundation model research and at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) with major contributions to computer vision and AI infrastructure systems. Creator of Detectron2, an open-source computer vision library widely adopted in research and production environments. His open-source projects support training and deployment for dozens of products within Meta and other industry leaders.
Executive Team
Yang Zhilin
CEO and Founder
31-year-old (as of 2026) computer scientist with PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, ranked first in Tsinghua University's Computer Science Department. Published 20+ influential AI papers, worked at Meta AI and Google Brain. Previously involved in Huawei's Pangu AI and Beijing Academy of AI's Wudao LLM.
Business Model
Revenue Model
API usage (pay-per-token pricing), subscription plans for consumer chatbot (freemium to premium conversion), model-as-a-service deals, and API licensing. Open-source models under Modified MIT License with attribution requirements for entities with 100+ million monthly users or $20 million+ monthly revenue.
Pricing Tiers
Four days of priority use of Kimi chatbot
One year of priority use of Kimi chatbot (6 total tiers ranging from 5.2 yuan for 4 days to 399 yuan annually)
Standard input pricing for multimodal model, context window 262,144 tokens
Cached input pricing for multimodal model
Output pricing for multimodal model
For K2 generation models
Cached input for K2 generation models
Output pricing for K2 generation models
Context window 131,072 tokens
Context window 131,072 tokens
Target Markets
- Developers building AI applications
- Enterprises building multi-modal AI agents
- International teams and businesses
- Content creators
- Researchers and academic institutions
- China's tech ecosystem (powering third-party apps, mini-programs, enterprise deployments)
- Long document analysis and processing
- Coding and software development
- Agent-based task automation
- Visual analysis applications
- Multi-modal AI agents for scenario-specific automation
- Enterprise RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications
History & Milestones
Released Kimi K2.5 multimodal model and Kimi Code coding agent; valuation increased to $4.8 billion in new funding round
Release of Kimi K2 open-source LLM with 1 trillion parameters, making it China's first open-source trillion-parameter model
Release of Kimi K2 Thinking for advanced reasoning and agentic tasks
Completed $500 million Series C funding round led by IDG Capital at $4.3 billion valuation
Raised $1 billion Series B at $2.5 billion valuation led by Alibaba
5 AI Tools by Moonshot AI
Kimi
1moAI assistant by Moonshot AI powered by the K2.5 model, with long-context chat, deep research, agentic task execution, and multi-format document creation.
Kimi Claw
1moCloud-hosted OpenClaw AI agent on Kimi.com with 5,000+ skills, 40GB storage, and live financial search — no server setup needed.
Kimi Code
2moAI-powered coding assistant that helps developers write, understand, and debug code with intelligent suggestions and explanations.
Kimi K2
8moOpen-source, multimodal agentic framework from Moonshot AI designed for structured tool use, function calling, and advanced orchestration.
Kimi AI
9moAdvanced AI assistant with extended context processing, multimodal capabilities, and real-time web search
