DeepSeek and Moonshot AI: China’s A.I. Stars Head for the Stock Market

China’s A.I. poster children are heading for the market. DeepSeek is preparing a listing in Shanghai, while Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, is aiming for Hong Kong. That puts them in the same queue as Zhipu and MiniMax, two Chinese A.I. labs that already went public.

Moonshot has moved fast. Bloomberg says the company was valued at nearly $50 billion in its latest round, up from $31.5 billion over the summer, around $20 billion in May, and only about $4.3 billion at the end of 2025. Alibaba and Tencent are among its backers, and a group of mostly French investors has also bought in ahead of the listing through an investment vehicle.

The Hong Kong IPO is planned for the first quarter of 2027, with early investor meetings possibly starting this month. Bloomberg reports that Moonshot is considering raising as much as $5 billion. Bank of America, CICC, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are working on the deal. The business is also growing quickly: annualized revenue is around $1 billion and is expected to reach $2 billion by December, helped by the open-weight Kimi K3 model, which sparked a “new DeepSeek moment” in stock markets in July.

DeepSeek’s path looks just as aggressive. Until a few months ago, it had no outside investors. In early summer, the Hangzhou lab closed its first funding round at a valuation of more than $50 billion, with founder Liang Wenfeng putting in the biggest share himself alongside Tencent, CATL and China’s state-backed A.I. fund. Now, according to The Information, a second round is close: another 50 billion yuan at a valuation of 500 billion yuan, or about $75 billion.

The money is not the whole story, though. On Artificial Analysis, which rolls up many benchmarks, neither Moonshot nor DeepSeek is sitting at the top. Kimi K3 scores 44, behind several U.S. models and also behind Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro and Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 among open-weight models. DeepSeek’s best model, V4.1 Flash, scores 39, while its flagship V4 Pro scores 36. The one thing DeepSeek does have is price: V4.1 Flash costs about 27 cents per task, far less than Claude, GPT or Kimi K3. For investors, that may matter more than bragging rights on a benchmark chart.