Kimi K3 maker Moonshot AI overtakes Wipro, gets twice as big as Tech Mahindra in net worth

Moonshot AI, the startup behind Kimi K3, just raised $3.5 billion at a $35 billion valuation. This makes the three-year-old Chinese startup more valuable than some Indian IT majors like Wipro and Tech Mahindra.Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi K3 AI model, is now worth more than some Indian IT companies. (Photo: Reuters)China’s Moonshot AI has just reached a $35 billion valuation after raising $3.5 billion in its latest funding round. The Kimi K3 maker has now surpassed some of India’s IT majors, such as Wipro and Tech Mahindra in market cap.To give you some context, Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 in Beijing. The startup is behind the Kimi K3 AI model that went viral recently for matching Anthropic’s Claude Fable in some tasks.Now, it is more valuable than some of India’s most important tech companies. For instance, Wipro has a market cap of roughly $19.7 billion with Tech Mahindra having a $17.2 billion valuation.Keep in mind that Wipro and Tech Mahindra have been providing IT services for decades now, while Moonshot was created only three years ago. Though this is not the first time that we have seen an AI startup go past the market cap of Indian IT companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are already valued higher than the biggest IT companies – TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech, and Tech Mahindra – combined.Both the US AI startups are planning to go public soon, potentially crossing $1 trillion in market cap each.What is Moonshot AI? Moonshot AI builds open-weight AI models. Unlike models like Claude Fable or GPT-5.6, open-weight models can be run locally on your device. This means that you can use models like Kimi K3 for cheaper than the frontier US models. Moonshot’s daily sales have reportedly risen at least six times since Kimi K3 was launched.The Chinese startup recently released the weights of Kimi K3, the numerical values the model learnt during training, allowing developers to download, tweak and host the technology freely.The company's rise has also placed it at the centre of US-China tensions. The White House has previously accused Moonshot of training K3 on restricted Nvidia chips and repeated allegations of distillation – the practice of extracting outputs from top competitors to improve performance.As per reports, Moonshot AI may go for another fundraising round soon, this time at a $50 billion market cap. The startup is also expected to file for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong later this year. Moonshot is said to have reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in June, up from $200 million in April.- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Jul 30, 2026 11:42 IST