Chinese AI startups 01.AI and Moonshot AI pivot to enterprise focus with multi‑billion‑euro valuations

China's AI startup 01.AI, led by Kai‑Fu Lee, secured contracts worth 1.5 billion yuan (about €194 million) within five months after abandoning the development of its own foundation models. The company now markets "Boss AI," a product that aggregates corporate data and lets executives query it via AI, built on open Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and GLM. Roughly half of its revenue now comes from customers outside China, including Europe, and it plans a Hong Kong IPO in 2027.

Separately, Moonshot AI raised €3.08 billion in a Series‑F round, valuing the firm at €30.8 billion. Its rapid rise is driven by the free, open‑weight language model Kimi K3, which matches top Western models in performance. Moonshot monetises the model through cloud services, compute capacity and future enterprise solutions rather than direct model sales. The funding round was led by the state‑backed National AI Industry Investment Fund, underscoring China's strategic push in the global AI market.