Moonshot AI, the fast-growing AI company backed by Alibaba and HongShan, has some thrilling news! She’s recently released a new open-source version of her model, Kimi K2.5, and an exciting new K-12 coding tool, Kimi Code. Yang Zhilin, an ex-researcher at Google and Meta who co-founded Moonshot AI. The company was founded by AI luminaries Alex Smola and David A.
Perhaps the biggest difference with the new Kimi K2.5 model is its multimodal functionality, enabling it to comprehend text, images, and video. This advanced model was trained on a whopping 15 trillion combined visual and text tokens. Because of this, it’s arguably one of the most powerful AI systems on the market. In extensive, challenging benchmarks, Kimi K2.5 has proven its unmatched, industry-leading power and precision. It beat competitors, even Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, on SWE-Bench Verified benchmark and scored higher than both GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro on SWE-Bench Multilingual benchmark.
Along with the release of Kimi K2.5, Moonshot AI released Kimi Code. This is not a mere research project. This open-source coding tool is designed to drastically expand software development processes. You can interact with this tool using easily accessible terminal interfaces. It works naturally in tandem with IDEs like VSCode, Cursor and Zed. These are all popular development platforms. With Code Kimi, Microsoft has got itself a serious competitor in the ring against similar products like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Google’s Gemini CLI.
Moonshot AI is riding a wave of incredible success after its recent Series B financing round. Throughout this funding round, the company raised the eye-popping sum of $1 billion, increasing the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion. The company plans to aggressively pursue more capital, too. It is seeking a valuation upwards of $5 billion as it further diversifies beyond a ridesharing tech provider. Furthermore, according to some analysts, by the end of 2025, Kimi alone will add a staggering $100 million to Moonshot AI’s revenue.
The race to catch up with today’s best performing AI models. Next month, Moonshot’s Chinese rival Deepseek is expected to announce its own new model, Deepseek 3, which reportedly offers similar or better coding capabilities that dazzle. As Moonshot AI continues to innovate and expand its portfolio, industry observers will be keenly watching how these developments will influence the broader AI market.
