Moonshot AI Secured $1 Billion Investment

Recently, the AI startup company Moonshot AI completed a new round of financing exceeding $1 billion, with investors including Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, Alibaba, and existing shareholders participating.

Moonshot AI was founded in April 2023. Its CEO Yang Zhilin graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University and was a student of Tsinghua Professor Tang Jie. He pursued his Ph.D. at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University, under the guidance of Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Head of Apple AI Research, and William Cohen, Chief Scientist at Google. Dr. Yang Zhilin graduated in 2019.

This is Yang Zhilin’s second entrepreneurial endeavor. In 2016, during his Ph.D. studies, he founded Recurrent.ai, a company focused on utilizing AI technologies such as NLP, speech, multimodal, and large models to create “sales technology” solutions. Reportedly, Recurrent.ai’s AI system backend has accumulated thousands of semantic models from various industries.

In 2023, Yang Zhilin, along with the original team from Recurrent.ai, founded Moonshot AI with the goal of AGI.

In less than a year since its establishment, Moonshot AI has already completed the training of a self-developed universal large model at the hundred billion level.

On October 9, 2023, Moonshot AI launched its first large model product, the intelligent assistant Kimi Chat, with a key feature of expanding the context window length. Kimi Chat supports input of ultra-long texts with a maximum of 200,000 Chinese characters. In November, Kimi Chat announced full external availability, no longer restricting access to beta testing.

In terms of product development, Moonshot AI is firmly focused on the B2C direction. Yang Zhilin believes that AI Native products will create new traffic entry points in the B2C field, becoming the Super App of the AI era, presenting a significant opportunity.

Simultaneously, Moonshot AI is also developing a self-made universal multimodal model, expected to be launched later this year.

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