Moonshot AI is targeting a manifold jump in annualized revenue to $2 billion by the end of the year, using the breakout success of its Kimi K3 model to dial up the heat on rivals from Anthropic PBC to Z.AI Co.
The Chinese AI developer recently told investors its annual recurring revenue — a gauge of forward-looking sales — topped $1 billion in August, up from $300 million in June, according to people familiar with the matter. That leap was fueled by the release in July of the massive Kimi K3 artificial intelligence model, which leapt to the top of performance benchmarks while costing drastically less than top US contenders.
The Beijing-based startup now expects to double its sales rate again, some of the people said, as consumers and enterprises show growing interest in the Kimi subscription offerings and models that Moonshot hosts online. The internal forecast is to reach $2 billion in annualized sales by the end of the year, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
Moonshot is in the process of raising funds at a $50 billion valuation, roughly in line with Z.ai's current market value, ahead of an initial public offering in Hong Kong as soon as this year. Its rapid growth underscores how a popular model can supercharge an AI lab's prospects.
The debut of Kimi K3 drew global attention, paying off an ambitious bet to build an unusually large AI model with 2.8 trillion parameters. Expanding the scale of parameters — the building blocks an AI system uses to make decisions — helped Moonshot stand out in an extremely competitive field, where US firms like OpenAI dominate the premium tier and Chinese rivals like DeepSeek win on price.
Moonshot is fast becoming a formidable competitor to publicly traded peers including Z.ai and MiniMax Group Inc. MiniMax said its annual recurring revenue hit $800 million in August. Z.ai's annualized sales surged to $1.6 billion that same month, after passing the $1 billion milestone in July.
Chinese AI developers still trail US frontier labs in terms of revenue. By mid-2026, Anthropic and OpenAI's annualized revenue had reached $65 billion and $40 billion, respectively. Regardless of their sales, AI labs everywhere face chronic investor concern about whether their huge investments in hardware and infrastructure will ultimately generate lucrative returns.
While Moonshot found early success among coders and solo entrepreneurs, the company is now looking to bigger enterprise clients for future growth. The startup recently assembled a team of engineers to help clients such as AsiaInfo Technologies Ltd. and Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Ltd. deploy its AI models.
Additional new sales could come from cloud service providers. Kimi K3's license requires companies hosting the model for commercial purposes to enter a separate agreement with Moonshot if their cumulative revenue surpasses $20 million over a 12-month period. The startup is in talks with Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google for a 30% revenue share, Reuters reported last month.
A Moonshot spokesperson declined to comment.
Chinese AI startups have to grapple with constant scrutiny over their technical capabilities. Moonshot and its domestic rivals face allegations of illicit distillation — the process of extracting outputs from a more powerful AI model to train a smaller one — from top US labs.
Anthropic this week accused Moonshot of covertly routing user requests to its Claude models and passing off the responses as Moonshot's own. Anthropic said it believes the responses were used to train the Chinese startup's software, an allegation Moonshot hasn't yet publicly addressed.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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