Moonshot targets Hong Kong IPO within 6 months at $30B valuation

Moonshot AI has informed investors that it intends to pursue a Hong Kong initial public offering within the next six months, according to a Bloomberg report published Saturday. The company has circulated a shareholder resolution seeking approval for the listing and is finalizing a fundraising round that could value the three-year-old startup at more than $30 billion. As of June, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue had reached $300 million, climbing from $200 million in April.

The accelerated timeline follows the release of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model unveiled last week. K3 matched or outperformed Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 across multiple benchmarks. Moonshot had been preparing to move forward with the listing before K3’s debut, but the model’s reception , which sent global tech stocks lower and drew a “concerning” reaction from former White House AI czar David Sacks , provided a real-world validation that no pitch deck could match. Artificial Analysis ranked K3 ahead of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on some frontier benchmarks, making it the first Chinese open-weight model to achieve that distinction.

To smooth the path for a Hong Kong listing under the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s updated rules, Moonshot is dismantling its offshore VIE structure. TNW reported in May that the company had abandoned the VIE waiver route after it became evident that Beijing would not grant an exemption. CICC and Goldman Sachs are in discussions to work on the offering. Moonshot was co-founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked at Meta and Google, and takes its name from a Pink Floyd album.

If completed, the IPO would rank among the largest Chinese AI listings on record. K3 is priced at roughly the same level as Anthropic’s Sonnet models, signaling that Moonshot believes it can command a premium over other Chinese offerings. The company generates revenue through tiered chatbot subscriptions and enterprise API access, and recently launched Kimi Work, a general-purpose AI agent. Its revenue remains smaller than that of Z. AI, which is on track for $1 billion in annual sales. DeepSeek is planning its own IPO for 2027. The competition to go public is also a competition to set the public-market valuation benchmark for Chinese AI, and Moonshot, at $30 billion and rising, aims to be the first across the line.