Moonshot AI, a large-scale model startup, has recently completed a B-round financing exceeding USD 1 billion, with participation from Meituan, Alibaba, and Xiaohongshu.
Moonshot AI, a large-scale model startup, has recently secured over USD 1 billion in a B-round financing. Investors include Alibaba(09988:HK), Meituan(03690:HK), Xiaohongshu, and Sequoia China. Following this round of financing, Moonshot AI is now valued at approximately USD 25 billion.
It is understood that Moonshot AI's previous financing in 2023 amounted to over USD 200 million, with investors including Sequoia China and ZhenFund.
Since the global wave sparked by ChatGPT, this marks the largest single-round funding obtained by a domestic large-scale AI model company to date.
The recent funding of over USD 1 billion for Moonshot AI demonstrates the capital market's high regard for the field of artificial intelligence, especially large-scale model technology. Thanks to the success and discussion surrounding technologies such as ChatGPT, large-scale models have become a concentrated representation of cutting-edge AI technology. Investing in such companies signifies a high recognition of the potential application of future AI technologies in the socio-economic sphere.
The investors in this funding round, including Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, and Alibaba, are all leading enterprises in their respective fields. Their involvement not only provides financial security for Moonshot AI but also signifies potential deeper cooperation in data, channels, and application scenarios, bringing advantages for the company's product implementation and market expansion. The fact that existing shareholders participated in this funding also demonstrates investors' sustained confidence in the company's future development and core team.
According to publicly available information, Moonshot AI is an AI startup founded in March 2023, focusing on the research and application of large-scale model technology.
The company's founder, Professor Yang Zhilin, has a profound research background in the field of deep learning. He is also a young scientist at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University. Previously, he worked at FAIR and Google Brain and was the first author of the Transformer-X and XLNet papers, both of which have had a profound impact on the academic community.
The founding team of Moonshot AI consists mainly of graduates from Tsinghua University, and also includes overseas talent from leading global technology companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon. The core team of the company has been involved in the development of several large models, such as Google Gemini, Google Bard, NLP, and Wudao.
Looking at domestic AI competitions, the top tier in the general large-scale model field has already become clear. According to current public information, in addition to Moonshot AI, valuation of startups in this field, including Knowledge Atlas, Baichuan, MiniMax and innoHere, has already reached USD 1 billion.
The current round of funding for Moonshot AI, as well as the recent funding situation of large-scale model companies, also indicates a change in the bettors at the general large-scale model layer domestically. Compared to 2023, there is still the active presence of venture capitalists in the general large-scale model layer. However, this year, major strategic investments from big companies have become frequent.
Each major company is taking a broad investment approach, rather than aligning with specific companies. Alibaba has invested in startups including Knowledge Atlas, Baichuan, and innoHere; Tencent has also invested in Knowledge Atlas, Baichuan, MiniMax, and others.
Despite significant reductions in algorithm optimization and model training costs for large models over the past year, large models remain an extremely expensive game. The funding window for top large model companies is still open, and the "arms race" is far from over.