Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi chatbot, is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong. At the same time, demand for its newly released Kimi K3 model has been so strong that the company has temporarily suspended new paid subscriptions.
According to Bloomberg, Moonshot has informed its shareholders that preparations for the IPO are underway. The company is aiming to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange within the next six months. A new funding round ahead of the listing could push the startup’s valuation above $30 billion.
The recently launched Kimi K3 has attracted significant attention across the AI community. According to Moonshot, despite being an open-weight model, K3 delivers performance close to leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic on several benchmarks, particularly in coding, agent-based tasks, and reasoning.
Shortly after the model’s release, Moonshot announced that it was temporarily suspending new paid subscriptions due to overwhelming demand and limited computing capacity.
The company said that existing subscribers will continue to use the service without interruption, while new subscriptions will gradually reopen as additional computing resources become available. Moonshot also plans to introduce two separate subscription tiers in the future: one for general Kimi users and another, called Kimi Code, designed specifically for developers.
If the IPO proceeds as planned, Moonshot AI could become one of the first major frontier AI companies in China to go public, providing the company with fresh capital to further expand the Kimi platform.
