Asia Tech Wire (Feb 20) -- Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has recently closed a new round of funding of over $1 billion.

The investors participating in the round include Sequoia Capital China, also known as HongShan, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, and Alibaba, according to several Chinese media reports.

After closing the funding round, the AI startup has reached a valuation of about $2.5 billion, making it one of the top companies in China's large-scale AI model sector.

And since ChatGPT kicked off the global AI wave, this is also the highest amount of single-round financing received by a Chinese large AI model company to date.

Regarding the news, Moonshot AI said on Monday that the company was not at liberty to comment on specific financing information at this time.

The company added that it has been, and will continue to be, persistent in promoting the underlying key technological advances and product innovations in the AGI sector in China, and will also continue to gear its capital strategy accordingly to the company's stage of development.

Founded in March 2023, Moonshot AI launched Kimi in October 2023, the world's first intelligent assistant product that supports inputting 200,000 Chinese characters.

Earlier, there were news that the company completed its first round of financing of over $200 million in June last year, with investors including HongShan and Beijing-based venture capital firm ZhenFund.

But Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin clarified in October 2023 that the company had received nearly 2 billion yuan in investment from well-known institutions such as Sequoia Capital, CapitalToday, and Monolith Capital.