Moonshot AI – creator of Kimi K3 model – has filed for Hong Kong IPO: sources
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI – developer of the leading Kimi K3 model – has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as the firm seeks to tap public markets to fund its rapid expansion. The Beijing-based company was targeting a Hong Kong listing as early as the first quarter of 2027, the sources told the South China Morning Post, asking not to be identified as the information was private. The...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI – developer of the leading Kimi K3 model – has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as the firm seeks to tap public markets to fund its rapid expansion.
The Beijing-based company was targeting a Hong Kong listing as early as the first quarter of 2027, the sources told the South China Morning Post, asking not to be identified as the information was private. The timeline remained subject to regulatory approvals and market conditions, they added.
Moonshot said it “doesn’t comment on market rumours or speculation” in a response to a query sent by the SCMP on Thursday.
The company was also looking to undertake a final financing round ahead of the IPO, which could value it at around US$50 billion, the people said.
The IPO and financing plan indicate the company is looking to accelerate fundraising as China’s AI labs step up competition with leading developers in the United States.
Moonshot made headlines in July with the release of its Kimi K3 model: the world’s largest open-weight AI model with more than 2.8 trillion parameters, which refers to the sophistication of AI systems with larger sizes usually indicating stronger capabilities.
The release of K3 sent shock waves across the US AI industry, as the model approaches the performance of leading proprietary systems in Silicon Valley while maintaining the price edge offered by Chinese open-source models.
At the unveiling of K3, Moonshot said the system delivered “open-frontier intelligence”, citing independent benchmarks to claim the new model outperformed leading products from Anthropic and OpenAI in some capabilities, while acknowledging that its “overall performance still trails the most powerful proprietary models.”
The model currently ranks as the top Chinese model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, along with Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.3. It is also far cheaper than leading US models: its price per million output token is 50 per cent lower than OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol and 70 per cent lower than Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) – a key metric that projects current monthly subscription income over a 12-month period – has been growing rapidly since earlier this year.
The company’s ARR is expected to reach US$1 billion by the end of the year, doubling from an estimated US$400 million to US$500 million as of mid-2026, according to a research note published by Nomura Securities in July.
The rapid growth was driven in part by growing adoption of the company’s developer platform, Nomura said in the report.
Moonshot is also exploring a revenue share deal with overseas cloud service providers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, under which the platforms could share up to 30 per cent of revenue from services hosting its Kimi K3 model, according to a Reuters report last month.
Moonshot is not the only Chinese AI firm looking to go public. Rivals including Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and Shanghai-based StepFun are also reportedly preparing for IPOs.
DeepSeek is planning to list on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like Star Market while also raising funds via a pre-IPO round, the SCMP reported last month.
Additional reporting by Coco Feng