Dark Side of the Moon Valuation Surges to $18 Billion: Quadrupled in Less Than 3 Months, New $1 Billion Funding Round Underway

AI companies remain favorites in the capital markets, with the valuation of large model enterprises doubling four times in three months.

On March 14, The Paper reported that Kimi’s valuation has risen to $18 billion. The company’s valuation has quadrupled in three months, and a new round of $1 billion funding is underway.

In less than three months, Kimi has completed three funding rounds, setting a record for the most consecutive large model financings in recent domestic history, and becoming one of the fastest domestic unicorns (valuation over $10 billion) to surpass $100 billion. Driven by the popularity of Kimi K2.5 model and Kimi Claw, since the end of January, Kimi’s revenue in 20 days has exceeded that of the entire year 2025.

According to data from global payments giant Stripe, the number of individual subscription payment orders for Kimi in January increased by 8,280% month-over-month, and in February, it increased by another 123.8%, entering Stripe’s top ten global rankings.

On February 23, The Paper exclusively learned that after raising over $1.2 billion in consecutive funding, Kimi achieved the highest funding amount in nearly a year for the large model industry, and also set the fastest pace among domestic companies from founding to becoming a unicorn.

Public information shows that it took ByteDance over four years to surpass $10 billion in valuation, Pinduoduo over three years, while Kimi went from an angel round of $300 million to over $10 billion in valuation in just over two years, increasing its value more than 30 times.

As a highly watched startup in the large model industry, Kimi has become a core target for capital market competition. Founder Yang Zhilin stated in an internal letter on December 31 last year that the company had completed a new round of $500 million funding, and its cash reserve of $10 billion was nearly twice the combined total of two other companies, Zhipu and MiniMax, which were about to go public at that time. Compared to raising funds through the secondary market, Kimi prefers to raise more money in the primary market to build a closed loop of technology, business, and capital.

Additionally, on March 9, Longgang District in Shenzhen announced that on the afternoon of March 14, it will hold the “Thousand People Lobster Conference” at the Shenzhen Robot Theater, jointly organized by Longgang District and Kimi. Besides offering free installation of OpenClaw by Kimi engineers and providing free trial qualifications for Kimi Claw, Kimi will also launch API lobster exclusive discounts, offering up to 40% recharge rebate coupons to help enterprises deploy lobster applications.