Moonshot AI has closed its final round of private fundraising at a valuation of about $50 billion and is heading toward an initial public offering in Hong Kong in the first quarter of 2027, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Chinese AI company behind the Kimi models has confidentially filed for the listing and has begun laying the groundwork to gauge investor sentiment, with early-look meetings with potential investors expected to start as early as this month. The IPO could raise up to $5 billion, which would make it one of the most hotly anticipated tech deals in Hong Kong in years.
The $50 billion figure is described as Moonshot's terminal private valuation — after this round, the company plans to go straight to the public markets. It is a steep climb from the $31.5 billion valuation in a funding round this summer, a jump of nearly 60 percent in a matter of months.
Hong Kong has become the default listing venue for Chinese AI model developers: Zhipu (Z.AI) and MiniMax have already gone public there, and AI-driven fundraising is setting fresh records on the exchange.
The valuation surge is backed by a sharply rising revenue curve. Bloomberg previously reported that Moonshot's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) stood at $300 million in June and crossed $1 billion in August. People familiar with the matter expect ARR to reach $2 billion by December — roughly a sevenfold increase in half a year.
ARR, an annualized run rate of subscription sales, is the key metric investors use to judge software companies. For a firm still pouring money into frontier model development, that trajectory is the centerpiece of the public-market pitch.
At the heart of the valuation story is Kimi K3, released in July. The open-weight model packs 2.8 trillion parameters, a one-million-token context window, and native visual capabilities, going nearly toe-to-toe with leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic on some benchmarks while undercutting U.S. frontier pricing.
The open strategy helped Kimi K3 spread fast: developers can deploy the weights independently while Moonshot monetizes through hosted services. That "open for adoption, cloud for revenue" flywheel is what drove ARR from $300 million toward the $1 billion mark.
The picture is not without shadows. The Information has reported that Chinese regulators opened a data-security probe into DeepSeek and Moonshot. Sources concede it is unclear how the investigation might affect the valuation or the IPO timetable.
Bloomberg's sources also stress that deliberations remain ongoing and the timing could still change. Moonshot representatives did not respond to requests for comment during a Chinese public holiday.
Moonshot is not the only AI company queuing for the public markets. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidential S-1 registration paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with listing windows reportedly targeted between late 2026 and early 2027.
That sets up a remarkable spectacle for early 2027: the flagship AI companies of China and the United States asking public investors for money in the same window, competing head-to-head over whose AI story is worth more. For investors, it is both a multiple-choice and an essay question — whether a $50 billion Moonshot is expensive will only be settled on listing day.
Keywords: Moonshot AI, Hong Kong IPO, Kimi, AI valuation, China tech