Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI is the Beijing company behind Kimi. It began in spring 2023, and its published business license records incorporation on 17 April 2023. Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin leads the company.
Company & leadership
- Founder and CEO
- Yang Zhilin, also listed as Zhilin Yang in English.
- Chinese company name
- 北京月之暗面科技股份有限公司, as named in the privacy notice published on 5 November 2026.
- Disclosed investor
- Alibaba. Its fiscal 2026 filing describes an investment made during fiscal 2024; it does not give a complete current shareholder list.
The company started with long documents
Moonshot dates its start to spring 2023. Kimi followed in October with support for 200,000 Chinese characters. This is a character count, not a token count. The company’s name refers to the far side of the Moon and the aim to explore beyond current knowledge.
NVIDIA’s March 2026 GTC program identifies Yang Zhilin as founder and CEO. His session covers how the company trained Kimi K2.5, including its optimizer and computing systems. This gives a direct view of his technical role as well as his leadership title.
The research team also includes Yuxin Wu. His own profile describes earlier work on foundation models at Google Brain and computer vision at Facebook AI Research. He created Detectron2 and lists degrees from Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon University.
A Beijing company with dated public records
The business license linked from Moonshot’s website was issued on 24 February 2025. It records incorporation on 17 April 2023 and names Yang Zhilin as legal representative. It lists an address at 76 Zhichun Road in Beijing’s Haidian District.
The website still links that older license. A privacy notice published on 5 November 2026 uses the company name 北京月之暗面科技股份有限公司. The notice states an effective date of 12 November 2026. The dated records show why an older company suffix should not be treated as the latest legal name.
Investment supported a change in direction
Alibaba’s fiscal 2026 annual report records an investment of about US$800 million in Moonshot preferred shares during the year ended 31 March 2024. It describes the stake acquired then as about 36%. This is a dated transaction figure, not a confirmed ownership percentage for November 2026.
Moonshot’s own history says it stopped promotion in spring 2025 to focus on model development. It identifies the July 2025 K2 weight release as a turning point. The same history records a US$500 million Series C announcement in December 2025.
Practical guidance. These events help explain the company’s public identity. Its history connects research releases, a user product and private investment. A funding amount does not establish model quality or a customer’s right to use a particular weight release.
Earlier service names and research releases
The May 2025 API log also names kimi-thinking-preview. It does not identify that endpoint as the published k1.5 research checkpoint. This directory therefore keeps that uncertain mapping out of the model aliases.