Cathay backs Moonshot AI as Kimi gains enterprise traction

Cathay Innovation has invested in Moonshot AI after the Beijing research lab released Kimi K2.5 on January 27, 2026, alongside a technical report and benchmark results. Within twenty days, Kimi K2.5’s monthly revenue had exceeded what the company earned in all of 2025, and revenue doubled every month after that. Cathay’s investment committee reached a unanimous decision in ten minutes and later added a second tranche, then a third, while Bloomberg reported Moonshot’s latest round at a nearly $20B valuation.

Kimi K2.5 is presented as a breakthrough for open-source models, leading open-source agentic and search benchmarks and competing with top closed-source systems in coding at roughly one-fifth of leading closed source models per token. Its cost profile comes from a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, custom serving infrastructure, and an in-house training optimizer that achieves roughly twice the token efficiency from the same training data. Kimi Linear also introduced 6x higher decoding efficiency at long context lengths.

Commercial adoption has accelerated. K2.5 powers Cursor’s Composer 2 and coding products used by Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, with Notion, Coinbase, Coursera and Perplexity also switching to Kimi. Kimi’s ARR has tripled in the three months since March, and enterprise API demand is oversubscribed, with compute access described as the main limit on revenue growth. Moonshot AI has raised approximately $5B across closed funding rounds since its founding in May 2023.