Late on the night of September 11th, a screenshot of a WeChat group chat, lacking any clear source and containing only a few lines of text, spread rapidly through China's venture capital circles and AI industry communities. Within a single night, the rumor spilled over from closed investor groups onto public platforms, capturing widespread attention and sparking intense speculation across the internet.

Approaching noon on September 12th, Moonshot AI's official Weibo account issued a legal statement: “The online information regarding the founder and employees is entirely fictitious and constitutes malicious defamation. The company has immediately reported the matter to public security authorities and will pursue the legal liability of those responsible for the rumors.” At the center of this storm is Moonshot AI, one of the fastest-growing and most highly capitalized startup unicorns in China's generative AI wave. In just three years, it has evolved from a fledgling startup into a major industry player valued at tens of billions of dollars, standing on the brink of an initial public offering. The ebb and flow of this rumor highlights the acute sensitivity of the capital markets, the undercurrents of intense industry competition, and the inherent vulnerability of AI startups to public opinion shifts.

Addressing the Rumor: “It's False, We've Reported It”

Retracing the timeline of the rumor's spread, the initial vehicle was merely a screenshot of a WeChat group chat. Initially, the message was active only in niche industry groups of dozens to hundreds of people, populated by investors and AI professionals. From there, it quickly fermented within these small circles. As community members forwarded and shared the information, it expanded to public social platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo. Investors began to cross-verify the news, sparking discussions about whether the company's funding and listing plans would be interrupted.

The company's response was swift. Around 11:20 AM on September 12th, Moonshot AI's legal department officially released a statement refuting the rumor, directly categorizing the online information as “malicious defamation,” and stating that it had immediately reported the case to public security authorities and would pursue legal action against those who spread it. Looking at a longer timeline, this is not the first time Moonshot AI has had to report to authorities or issue denials recently. As its reputation has grown, a number of equity frauds have emerged in the primary market using the company's name. Various intermediaries have been peddling so-called “old share quotas” or “reserved quotas,” claiming they could secure investment stakes. In response, the company has issued multiple statements warning investors of scams and reporting them to public security. These statements emphasize that all of the company's financing is handled directly by itself, with no third parties authorized as financial or financing advisors. Furthermore, transfers of old shares (including common stock and incentive equity) require internal company approval; any unauthorized transactions will not be recognized or validated by the company.

Various rumors are a normal byproduct of a high-growth tech startup, but this also highlights the most vulnerable aspect of a star unicorn. The core assets of a large model startup are its founding team, algorithmic talent, and computational power. For investors, the stability of the founding team is almost synonymous with the company's value itself. The information asymmetry surrounding this provides ample room for rumors to breed. A baseless piece of gossip can stir up the entire AI investment community in a short time, perhaps also because Moonshot AI is currently in a unique time window. The company is navigating its most sensitive phase of capitalization, with persistent market rumors about a Hong Kong IPO and Pre-IPO financing rounds, with valuations reportedly reaching the $50 billion mark. At such a juncture, any negative speculation about the company or its team requires a timely and cautious response.

A Three-Year Ascent Propelled by Capital

Moonshot AI's story is one of the most legendary examples in China's large model entrepreneurship wave. The company was relatively recently established, registered in Beijing in April 2023, and is recognized as one of the “AI Six Tigers” in China's large model field. Founder Yang Zhilin is a post-90s researcher who previously worked at Google Brain and Meta AI, with a deep academic background. Born in Shantou, Guangdong in 1992, he enrolled at Tsinghua University in 2011 to study Thermal Engineering before switching to the Computer Science department in his sophomore year, under the mentorship of Professor Tang Jie. He later pursued a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, where he produced two significant NLP works, Transformer-XL and XLNet, the latter being selected for a NeurIPS Oral presentation, making him one of the most highly cited NLP scholars among post-90s researchers. During his doctoral studies, Yang Zhilin co-founded the To-B NLP enterprise Recurrent AI.

When the generative AI wave erupted in 2023, he judged that the window for developing AGI had arrived and founded Moonshot AI, a name inspired by the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon.” As the company's technological core, fundraising credibility, and product soul, Yang Zhilin's personal fate is deeply intertwined with the company. The startup launched into the fast lane from its inception. Just two months after its founding, Moonshot AI secured a nearly RMB 2 billion (over USD 200 million) angel round, with top-tier institutions like Sequoia Capital China and ZhenFund participating. In October 2023, the Kimi Chat product officially launched, initially supporting long-context input of approximately 200,000 Chinese characters, opening the market with its differentiated long-text reading capability. After expanding context to 2 million characters in March 2024, it rapidly gained widespread attention, capturing a market gap and amassing a large base of C-end users. Over the following two years, financing rounds came in succession, with industrial capital such as Alibaba, Meituan Longzhu, and Tencent entering the fray, continuously increasing their investments.

However, the company's development path has not been entirely smooth. In 2025, the landscape of the domestic large model sector underwent a dramatic shift as DeepSeek rose unexpectedly, momentarily diverting market attention. Moonshot AI experienced a period of growth pressure, shrinking marketing spend, and stalled funding, including a financing gap that lasted as long as 16 months. The turning point came on July 16, 2026, when Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, a model with 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the world's largest open-source model. Immediately upon its release, it topped the Hugging Face popularity chart, rekindling market enthusiasm. From that moment, Moonshot AI entered a nearly vertical valuation curve. According to public market information, the company's post-money valuation was around USD 4.3 billion at the end of 2025. By May 2026, after a Series D round, the valuation surpassed USD 20 billion. In July, following the completion of a Series F round, the valuation reached USD 35 billion. Shortly after, a Pre-IPO round was initiated, with market reports suggesting a pre-money valuation of USD 50 billion. This rate of growth—multiplying the valuation several times over in just seven months—is rare in the history of domestic venture capital.

Storm Clouds Gather Before the IPO

Accompanying the skyrocketing valuation is the increasingly hot topic of an initial public offering. At the end of 2025, Yang Zhilin issued an open letter stating, “The company currently holds over RMB 10 billion in cash and is in no hurry to list in the short term.” However, things began to change from the end of June this year. The company underwent industrial and commercial changes, and on July 29th, it completed its股份制改造 (shareholding system reform), a classic preparatory step before an IPO. On August 11th, it filed for board member registration. Subsequently, in July, outlets like 《投资界》 and 《科创版日报》 reported that Kimi had notified investors to begin adjusting the company's structure, formally preparing for a Hong Kong IPO, potentially completing the listing within six months at the earliest. Additionally, according to 《晚点LatePost》, the company submitted a confidential A1 filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in early September, officially initiating the Hong Kong IPO process. Although the company responded that it would not comment on market rumors and had no information to disclose at that time, the capital market has generally accepted that Moonshot AI is only a step away from landing on the secondary market.

Monetization efforts are also being accelerated. Citing information from an investor briefing, Bloomberg reported that Moonshot AI's ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is growing rapidly: approximately USD 100 million in March, exceeding USD 300 million by mid-June, and crossing the USD 1 billion threshold by August. Internally, the company has set an ambitious ARR target of USD 2 billion by the end of 2026. The price of such rapid growth is that all eyes are now fixed on the company, magnifying every controversy and detail from its past. Currently, a large number of domestic AI unicorns are approaching the point of capitalization. In the coming two years, more large model startups will head to the capital markets. The public opinion challenges Moonshot AI is facing now, other companies may very well encounter in the future.

This article has been adapted from Phoenix New Media Finance. Edited by Chen Yufeng.