(Yicai) Feb. 20 -- China's Moonshot AI has secured USD1 billion in financing, the most raised by a large language model developer in a single fundraiser in recent years, according to technology media 36Kr.

The new funding round has boosted Moonshot AI’s value to USD2.5 billion, the report said. Participants included internet giants Alibaba Group Holding, Meituan and Xiaohongshu as well as private equity firm Sequoia China.

The Beijing-based company made no comment regarding the financing.

Moonshot AI is developing its own multimodal model based on images and videos, that should be launched later this year, 36Kr said.

The startup, founded in March last year, has trained a 100-billion-parameter language model, and in October 2023 launched its first large language model Kimi Chat that can process long text inputs of 200,000 Chinese characters.

Moonshot AI had raised USD300 million in financing before this round and employs more than 80 people. Its core team members have participated in the research and development of other large language models such as Google Gemini, Google Bard, Pangu NLP and WuDao.

Editor: Kim Taylor