Moonshot AI, a promising Chinese AI startup, recently completed a $500 million (approximately 7.2 trillion Korean won) Series C funding round, attracting industry attention. As a representative generative AI company in China, Moonshot AI aims to gain an advantage in the competition for next-generation model development through large-scale infrastructure investment.
This round of investment, led by IDG Capital, amounted to $150 million, with participation from existing investors including Alibaba and Tencent. As a result, the company's valuation jumped to $4.3 billion (approximately 6.192 trillion Korean won), and it reportedly held 10 billion yuan (approximately 1.44 trillion Korean won) in cash as of the announcement.
The Dark Side of the Moon is one of China's leading generative AI companies, often referred to as the "AI Tigers." Along with companies like Z.ai and MiniMax, it aims to rival the model development capabilities of US giants OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (GOOGL), ultimately striving to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) that surpasses human levels. These companies have risen to become representatives of Asia's rapidly growing emerging technology sector, much like the "Four Asian Tigers."
Currently, MiniMax and Zhipu AI are both pursuing their initial public offerings (IPOs) in Hong Kong. Zhipu AI has submitted its listing documents, aiming to raise $560 million (approximately 806 billion Korean won), while MiniMax has also initiated its IPO process, aiming to raise approximately $600 million (approximately 864 billion Korean won). Meanwhile, Moon's Dark Side stated that it has no plans to go public at this time, as it has secured sufficient funding. Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin emphasized in an internal letter: "We are not considering an IPO in the short term; our primary task at present is to expand our AI infrastructure."
Last year, Dark Side of the Moon gained attention for its self-developed flagship model, "Kimi K2 Thinking." This model is a massively multi-scale language model composed of up to one trillion parameters, designed as a "thinking agent" capable of processing complex instructions step by step. Its key feature is its ability to autonomously execute continuous tasks involving 200 to 300 steps using external software such as browsers, search engines, and data extraction tools.
Kimi K2 Thinking has demonstrated superior performance across multiple key metrics in comparative evaluations with the latest US models such as GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, earning high praise from experts. This has driven a nearly fourfold increase in overseas revenue for Dark Side of the Moon, and a 170% increase in paid users since its release. Dark Side of the Moon is focusing on expanding its capabilities based on technological strength, particularly demonstrating its competitiveness in the global open-source large language model market.
The US government is also increasingly focused on the dark side of the moon. According to a US government report last year, the company was presented as a symbolic example of China's deepening AI technology and was described as a representative trend driving industrial upgrading and strengthening technological independence.
This financing event is interpreted as a vivid example of the concretization of the independent growth strategy of Chinese technology companies against the backdrop of accelerating competition for technological hegemony between China and the United States. Moonlight's move to invest hundreds of billions of yuan in AI infrastructure is also expected to have a significant impact on the competitive landscape of the global large language model market.
