Kimi model developer Moonshot AI raises revenue target

Serdar HocamAuthor & Editor

China-based artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI has raised its year-end revenue target to $2 billion, driven by the commercial momentum of the K3 model released in the summer.

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Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2 billion in annual revenue | TechCrunch

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, the force behind the Kimi models, is aiming to reach $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, fueled by the success of its open-weight model.

Year-end revenue target announced

Moonshot AI, one of China's leading artificial intelligence labs, plans to achieve significant sales growth with the contribution of its popular open-weight model. The company aims to generate $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year.

Performance of the K3 model

This ambitious target is built on the success achieved by the K3 model, which the company launched in the summer. Although usage rates for the K3 model have experienced a slight decline in recent months, OpenRouter data shows that approximately 300 billion tokens are generated through the system every day.

Comparison with global competitors

Moonshot's projected revenues remain well behind giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, which recently reported revenues of $40 billion and $65 billion, respectively. Because open-weight models are offered for free, the company's profit margins are significantly lower compared to its closed-weight competitors.

Model distillation allegations

Meanwhile, the company's model development processes have also brought some controversy. Anthropic recently accused Moonshot of running a prolonged model distillation campaign, claiming that requests from Kimi were being routed to Claude Opus.