Founder in trouble? Moonshot AI hit by a sudden storm of veiled attacks on the eve of its IPO.

On the night of September 11, a screenshot of a WeChat group chat with no source and only a few lines of text spread rapidly through China's venture capital circles and AI practitioner communities. Overnight, the news spilled out from closed investor group chats and flooded the entire internet, sparking widespread speculation. Around noon on the 12th, Moonshot AI's official Weibo account issued a legal statement: "The information circulating online about the founder and employees is entirely fabricated and constitutes malicious rumor-mongering. The company has immediately reported the matter to public security authorities and will pursue legal liability against those responsible for the rumors in accordance with the law." At the center of the storm, Moonshot AI is one of the fastest-growing and most capital-favored startup unicorns in China's generative AI wave. In just three years, it has grown from a startup into an industry player valued at tens of billions of dollars, standing on the eve of an IPO. The rumor storm came and went, but behind it lies the extreme sensitivity of capital markets, the undercurrents of industry competition, and the inherent public opinion vulnerability of AI startups. 01 "Rumors, Reported to Police" Tracing the timeline of the rumor's spread, the originating medium was merely a single WeChat group chat screenshot. Initially, the message was only active in vertical industry WeChat groups of dozens or hundreds of people, gathering investors and AI industry practitioners. Subsequently, the message rapidly fermented within small circles. As community members forwarded and spread it, the message reached public social platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo. Investors began seeking verification from one another, with discussions about whether the company's financing and IPO plans would be interrupted rising one after another. The company's response was also very swift. Around 11:20 AM on the 12th, Moonshot AI formally issued a rumor-refutation statement through its legal department, directly characterizing the online information as "malicious rumor-mongering," stating that it had immediately reported the matter to public security authorities and would pursue legal liability against the rumor-mongers in accordance with the law. If we extend the timeline, this is not the first time Moonshot AI has reported to police and refuted rumors recently. Previously, as Moonshot AI's fame grew, a large number of equity fraud schemes emerged in the primary market using the company's name. Many intermediaries peddled so-called "old share quotas" and "reserved quotas," claiming they could secure investment shares. In response, the company issued multiple statements warning investors to be wary of scams and reported to public security authorities. The statements said that all of the company's financing is handled directly by the company itself, and no third party has been authorized as a financial advisor or financing advisor; transfers of old shares (including ordinary shares and incentive equity) must be approved internally by the company, and any transactions without approval will not be recognized or confirmed by the company. Various rumors are a normal accompaniment to high-speed growth tech startups, and this is precisely where star unicorns are most vulnerable. The core assets of large model startups are the founding team, algorithm talent, and computing power assets. For investors, the stability of the founding team is almost equivalent to the company's value itself. And the information gap related to this leaves enormous room for rumors to breed. A rumor without any evidence can stir the entire AI venture capital circle in a short time, perhaps also because Moonshot AI is currently in a special time window. At present, the company is in the most sensitive stage of its capitalization process, with continuous market rumors about a Hong Kong IPO and Pre-IPO financing, and valuation rumors having reached the $50 billion magnitude. At such a juncture, any negative rumors about the company and its team require the company to respond promptly and cautiously. 02 Three Years of Rise, Pushed Forward by Capital The story of Moonshot AI is the most legendary sample in China's large model startup wave. The company has not been around long, registered in Beijing in April 2023, and is one of the "AI Six Tigers" in China's large model sector. Founder Yang Zhilin is a post-90s researcher who has worked at Google Brain and Meta AI, with a deep academic background. Yang Zhilin was born in 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong. In 2011, he enrolled in Tsinghua University's Department of Thermal Engineering, transferred to the Department of Computer Science in his sophomore year, and studied under Professor Tang Jie. He then went to Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute for his doctorate, producing two heavyweight NLP achievements: Transformer-XL and XLNet, the latter selected for NeurIPS Oral, making him one of the most-cited post-90s NLP researchers. During his doctoral studies, Yang Zhilin co-founded the To-B NLP company Recurrent AI. In 2023, when the generative AI wave erupted, he judged that the window for AGI development had arrived and founded Moonshot AI, with the company name derived from Pink Floyd's classic album "The Dark Side of the Moon." As the company's technical core, financing credit, and product soul, Yang Zhilin's personal fate is deeply bound to the enterprise. The startup began on the fast track. Just two months after founding, Moonshot AI secured nearly 2 billion yuan (over $200 million) in angel round financing, with top institutions such as Sequoia China and ZhenFund participating. In October 2023, the product Kimi Chat officially launched, initially supporting approximately 200,000 Chinese characters of long context, opening the market with its differentiated long-text reading capability; in March 2024, after the context was further expanded to 2 million characters, it quickly went viral, seizing a market gap and gaining massive consumer users. In the following two years, financing rounds came one after another, with industrial capital including Alibaba, Meituan Dragon Ball, and Tencent entering successively, as capital continued to increase its bets. But the company's development path has not been smooth sailing. In 2025, the landscape of China's large model sector underwent dramatic changes, with DeepSeek rising abruptly, diverting market attention for a time. Moonshot AI experienced a period of growth pressure, reduced spending, and stalled financing, with a funding gap lasting as long as 16 months. The turning point came on July 16, 2026, when Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters, becoming the world's largest open-source model by parameter count. After launch, it immediately topped the Hugging Face trending list, reigniting market enthusiasm. From that moment on, Moonshot AI entered a nearly vertical upward valuation curve. According to public market information, at the end of 2025, the company's post-investment valuation was approximately $4.3 billion; in May 2026, after the D round, the valuation exceeded $20 billion; in July, after the F round was completed, the valuation reached $35 billion. Immediately after, Pre-IPO financing began, with market talk of a pre-money valuation of $50 billion. In just seven months, the valuation multiplied several times overa growth rate rare even in China's venture capital history. 03 Storm on the Eve of IPO Along with the surging valuation, IPO talk continued to heat up. At the end of 2025, Yang Zhilin published an open letter stating, "The company currently holds over 10 billion yuan in cash and is not in a hurry to go public in the short term." But starting from the end of June this year, things changed: the company underwent industrial and commercial registration changes; on July 29, the company completed its shareholding system reforma landmark preliminary move for a company preparing for an IPO; on August 11, it completed board member filing. Then in July, reports from Investment World, STAR Market Daily, and others said Kimi had notified investors to begin adjusting the company's structure, formally preparing for a Hong Kong IPO, potentially completing the listing within six months. According to LatePost, the company submitted a confidential A1 listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in early September, formally initiating the Hong Kong IPO process. Although the company responded that "it does not comment on market rumors and currently has no information available for disclosure," the capital market has already assumed that Moonshot AI is just one step away from landing in the secondary market. Commercialization has also pressed the accelerator. According to Bloomberg citing investor communication meeting information, Moonshot AI's ARR (annual recurring revenue) has grown rapidly: ARR was approximately $100 million in March, exceeded $300 million in mid-June, and crossed the $1 billion mark in August, with the company internally setting a 2026 year-end ARR target of $2 billion. The price of running at high speed is that all eyes converge on this company, and all controversies and past history will be infinitely magnified. Now a large number of domestic AI unicorns have reached the threshold of capitalization. In the next two years, more large model startups will head toward the capital markets. The public opinion test that Moonshot AI has encountered may also be faced by other companies in the future. This article is reprinted from Phoenix Finance. GMTEight editor: Chen Yufeng.