Moonshot AI launches Pre-IPO round at $50B, pauses Kimi K3 new consumer subscriptions due to compute strain
Moonshot AI on Aug 16 opened a Pre-IPO round at a $50B pre-money valuation, then on Aug 17 paused new consumer subscriptions to Kimi K3 due to compute strain.
Moonshot AI on August 16, 2026 launched its Series G (Pre-IPO) financing round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, up more than 11x from the $4.3 billion Series C valuation at the end of 2025 in just eight months. On the same day, the company's 2.8 trillion parameter open-source model Kimi K3 rose to the top of global open-source leaderboards and became available in the GitHub Copilot model picker.
On August 17, Moonshot AI notified users that it was pausing new consumer subscriptions on Kimi.com due to surging requests and compute pressure, with enterprise customers prioritized. The company also announced that kimi-k2.5 and moonshot-v1 will be retired on August 31, 2026, asking developers to migrate to kimi-k3, k2.6, or k2.7-code. The move signals that domestic large models have entered a fast-replacement cycle.
On August 17 the same day, Chinasoft International signed a "Moonshot Plan" Token revenue-share agreement with Moonshot, cooperating on enterprise-facing Agentic AI. Chinasoft will use its state-owned enterprise customer base in energy, power, and finance to bring Kimi into high-barrier government and enterprise markets.