On July 29, according to reports, Dark Side of the Moon, the creator of Kimi, has closed its Series F funding round, raising over $3.5 billion. This puts the company’s post-investment valuation at a staggering $35 billion. Because the final amount was more than three times the original target, the round was closed early. The originally scheduled Series G (Pre-IPO) round for August has been moved up, now starting with a pre-investment valuation of $50 billion.
Just before this massive funding landed, Dark Side of the Moon had been making a lot of noise in AI tech over the previous two weeks. On the evening of July 16, the company officially unveiled its next-generation flagship model, Kimi K3. It comes with native visual understanding capabilities and supports a massive context window of 100 million tokens, setting a new global record for open-source models with 2.8 trillion total parameters.
On the authoritative third-party Frontend Code Arena benchmark, Kimi K3 scored 1679 points to claim the top spot. This makes it the first open-source large model to completely surpass leading closed-source flagship products like GPT and Claude in front-end coding ability.
After the launch of Kimi K3, user demand completely blew past the company’s expectations. To manage this, on July 20, Dark Side of the Moon released a statement about computing power shortages and a temporary halt on new memberships. They announced an immediate pause on new user subscriptions for their consumer product, redirecting all available computing power to serve existing subscribers and ensuring their benefits wouldn’t be affected.
Just ten days after the tech release, late on the night of July 27, Dark Side of the Moon kept its promise and fully open-sourced the Kimi K3 chain. They released the model weights, technical report, and key infrastructure technologies that powered K3’s training: MoonEP, FlashKDA, and AgentEnv. The company stated that anyone can now download and deploy the Kimi K3 model, whether for internal R&D or embedding into end-user products, completely free of charge.
After announcing the open-source release, Kimi K3 immediately shot to the top of Hugging Face’s global trending list, setting a record for the fastest surge in popularity on the platform. This move significantly amplified the voice of Chinese large models in the global open-source ecosystem.
On July 28, Dark Side of the Moon announced the launch of the Kimi Global Ambassador program. They are “recruiting pioneers from around the world who use Kimi deeply in real-world scenarios and are eager to share their experiences and insights with others.”
The hardcore technical prowess of Kimi K3 also caught the attention of top global tech figures. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and xAI, commented “Impressive” on a social media post about the model’s benchmark results. The very next day, he announced on X that xAI would begin training its own 2-trillion-parameter Grok 4.5 model, even stating it would “likely surpass Kimi.” This was seen by industry insiders as a direct challenge to Kimi K3.
In response, Dark Side of the Moon’s official account first @Musk, replying, “Welcome to the 2 trillion+ club.” Then, on July 21, according to a report, Huang Zhenxin, the head of Dark Side of the Moon’s enterprise business, when asked about Musk’s claim that “Grok 4.5 will quickly surpass Kimi,” said, “Maybe this (K3) performance gave them a bit of a shock. Now we’ll wait and see. I hope they’ll step up and have a real showdown with us.”
Looking at the capital trajectory, this $3.5 billion Series F round continues the sky-high valuation curve that Dark Side of the Moon has been on throughout 2026.
Back in May of this year, the company had just completed a $2 billion funding round led by Meituan DragonBall, with participation from institutions like China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng. Kimi has now raised over 37.6 billion yuan in total, making it the most well-funded startup in China’s large model space.
In the first two months of this year, the company also closed three consecutive funding rounds of $500 million, $700 million, and $700 million, pushing its valuation from $10 billion to $18 billion. Existing investors like Alibaba, Tencent, and Wuyuan Capital continued to increase their stakes.
Dark Side of the Moon was founded in April 2023. Just two months after its founding, it had already closed a nearly 2 billion yuan angel round with investors including top firms like Sequoia China and ZhenFund. In February 2024, it raised over $1 billion at a $2.5 billion valuation. By August of that year, another $300 million round pushed the valuation to $3.3 billion. In December 2025, a $500 million Series C round brought the valuation to $4.3 billion.
With old investors piling in and new institutions rushing to join, the driving force is clearly the company’s strong commercial performance. Public information shows that by mid-June, Dark Side of the Moon’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) had surpassed $300 million, with API call revenue accounting for over 70% of total revenue. After the official launch of Kimi K3, the company’s daily sales grew at least six-fold month-over-month.
Currently, Dark Side of the Moon sits firmly in the first tier of China’s large model startups. Market rumors suggest the company is in talks for a Pre-IPO round and is planning to list in Hong Kong within the next six months.
