On May 24th, Alibaba Group Holding Limited released its annual report for the fiscal year 2024 on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. The report disclosed details of Alibaba‘s investment in the artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI.
As of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, Alibaba Group Holding Limited invested a total of approximately $800 million to acquire about 36% equity stake in Moonshot AI as a preferred stock investment.
Moonshot AI was established in April 2023 and announced a breakthrough in the “long text” field in October of the same year, launching its first intelligent assistant product Kimi Chat that supports input of up to 200,000 Chinese characters. Moonshot AI had received multiple rounds of investments within six months since its establishment. Prior public information indicates that it recently completed financing exceeding $1 billion in February this year, with Alibaba Group Holding Limited being one of the main investors.
In April this year, Jiemian News reported that Yang Zhilin, the founder of Moonshot AI, had cashed out tens of millions of dollars by selling personal shares. A large-scale enterprise that was just established for a year, after receiving $1 billion in financing, the founder sold shares to cash out. This news shocked both the AI circle and investment circle. In response to this news, at that time, The Moonshot AI told reporters: “The above-mentioned news is not true.”
SEE ALSO: Founder of Moonshot AI Cashed out Tens of Millions of USD
According to Similarweb’s research, in March 2024, Kimi Intelligent Assistant had a monthly visit volume of 12.18 million times. On platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, searching for keywords like ‘Kimi Intelligent Assistant,’ ‘Kimi AI,’ and ‘Copywriting made easy’ will show a large number of Kimi’s advertising efforts.
According to reports from Sina Technology, the cost per customer acquisition for Kimi’s advertising is currently around 10 yuan. If we include the computing power cost generated by user Q&A interactions after attracting new users, the customer acquisition cost per user reaches 12-13 yuan. According to data from third-party platforms in the past month, there have been an average of 17,805 downloads per day; therefore, Kimi’s daily customer acquisition cost needs at least 200 thousand yuan.
Money and computing power are essential resources in this AI big model game. In order to stay at the table, Moonshot AI is accelerating its fundraising efforts. However, the high valuation of Moonshot AI and the difficulty of exiting the AI track have discouraged many institutions.
Just this week, exclusive news from ‘Waves’ revealed that fundraising for Moonshot AI is still ongoing, with a latest round valuation reaching 3 billion US dollars. New entrants include Tencent, Gaorong Capital and other institutions.
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