When we talk about Chinese AI, the first name that comes up is DeepSeek. Just so — it shook the global market in January 2025. But China has at least three other AI companies that are growing fast, capturing billions, and in two cases, have already gone public in Hong Kong. And almost no one in Brazil knows who they are.
We're talking about Moonshot AI (creator of Kimi), Zhipu AI (now Z.ai), and MiniMax. Together, these three companies are part of the group that Chinese investors call "AI Tigers" — the Chinese AI startups in 2026 that are defining the future of the sector.
In this article, we will delve into each of them: who founded them, how much they are worth, what production model they have, and — the part that interests those who work with technology in Brazil — how to access these tools.
Moonshot AI: the creator of Kimi, the chatbot that challenged Ernie Bot
Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin — three colleagues from Tsinghua University. The company's name is a reference to Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, Yang's favorite. The headquarters is in Beijing and the team had about 200 employees in 2024 (Wikipedia).
The main product is Kimi, a chatbot launched in October 2023 that immediately stood out by processing up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation — an enormous context window for the time. Kimi quickly became the closest competitor to Baidu's Ernie Bot in the Chinese market (Wikipedia).
In January 2026, Moonshot launched Kimi K2.5, a multimodal update that added native vision to the model through a 400 million parameter vision encoder called MoonViT. The model processes images and video, allowing tasks such as replicating user journeys on websites from video demonstrations (Wikipedia).
Yang Zhilin's stated ambition is ambitious: to build foundation models to achieve AGI. He defined three milestones — long context, multimodal world model, and a scalable architecture capable of continuous self-improvement without human input (Wikipedia).
Beyond the chatbot, the product line includes Kimi Researcher (automated research), Kimi Agent (task automation), Kimi Code (programming assistant), and Kimi Audio (voice processing). The company also developed Kimina Prover, aimed at formal mathematical demonstrations. Moonshot explored the American market in 2024 with a role-playing app called Ohai and a music video clip generator called Noisee, although it officially denied plans for international expansion (Wikipedia).
The money behind Moonshot
Moonshot's funding trajectory is impressive for a company under three years old:
- Initial round: US$60 million, valuation of US$300 million, with 40 employees (Wikipedia)
- February 2024: US$1 billion led by Alibaba, valuation of US$2.5 billion (Wikipedia)
- August 2024: US$300 million with Tencent and Gaorong Capital, valuation of US$3.3 billion (Wikipedia)
- October 2025: Round of approximately US$600 million led by IDG Capital, pre-money valuation of US$3.8 billion (Wikipedia)
In less than three years, Moonshot went from US$300 million to US$3.8 billion in valuation. The company remains private — unlike the other two we will see below.
Zhipu AI (Z.ai): the veteran who left Tsinghua and went public
Zhipu AI is the oldest of the three. Founded in 2019 by Tang Jie and Li Juanzi, researchers from Tsinghua University, the company started as an academic spin-off. Today it operates with more than 800 employees and is led by CEO Zhang Peng (Wikipedia).
The International Data Corporation (IDC) classifies Zhipu as the third-largest player in LLMs in the Chinese AI market. In 2025, the company underwent an international rebranding and adopted the name Z.ai (Wikipedia).
The flagship is the family of GLM (General Language Model) models. The recent evolution is rapid:
- GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air (July 2025): running on only eight Nvidia H20 GPUs (Wikipedia)
- GLM-4.5V (August 2025): vision-language model with 106 billion parameters (Wikipedia)
- GLM-4.6 (September 2025): first model to integrate FP8 and Int4 quantization on Cambricon chips — 100% Chinese hardware (Wikipedia)
- GLM-5 (February 2026): the latest generation (Wikipedia)
A detail that few noticed: Z.ai managed to run its models on Huawei's Ascend processors, in addition to Cambricon and Moore Threads chips. This means that the company is preparing for a scenario where access to Nvidia GPUs is completely cut off.
Z.ai's IPO in Hong Kong
On January 8, 2026, Z.ai carried out its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (ticker SEHK: 2513), becoming the first major Chinese LLM company to go public (Wikipedia).
Before the IPO, the company had already raised significant rounds:
- 2023: 2.5 billion yuan (~US$350 million) from Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan (Wikipedia)
- May 2024: US$400 million with participation from Prosperity7 Ventures (Saudi Arabia), valuation of ~US$3 billion (Wikipedia)
In February 2026, JPMorgan Chase recommended buying shares of Z.ai and MiniMax to investors (Wikipedia).
A fact that complicates the scenario: in January 2025, the US Department of Commerce placed Zhipu on the Entity List, the US export blacklist, citing national security concerns (Wikipedia).
MiniMax: from SenseTime to Hailuo AI and the Hong Kong stock exchange
MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie, Yang Bin, and Zhou Yucong — all from SenseTime, the giant of Chinese computer vision. The headquarters is in Shanghai and the team has more than 200 employees (Wikipedia).
The initial funding came from an unexpected place: MiHoYo, the company behind the Genshin Impact game. Then, Alibaba, Tencent, Hillhouse Investment, HongShan, and IDG Capital entered the subsequent rounds. In March 2024, Alibaba led a round of US$600 million that valued MiniMax at US$2.5 billion (Wikipedia).
On January 9, 2026 — one day after Z.ai — MiniMax carried out its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (ticker SEHK: 100) (Wikipedia).
MiniMax's differentiator is in consumer-facing products. The company's first app, Glow, was launched in October 2022 and allowed for creating virtual characters to discuss any topic. In four months, it reached 5 million users. After being removed from Chinese stores in 2023, it was reborn as Talkie (international market, June 2023) and Xing Ye (Chinese market, September 2023). Talkie reached 11 million monthly active users and was among the most downloaded free entertainment apps in the US, according to the Wall Street Journal (Wikipedia).
In terms of models, the company launched MiniMax-M2.5 in February 2026, along with the M2.5-Lightning variant. The portfolio also includes Hailuo AI — a platform for generating video, audio, and music that directly competes with OpenAI's Sora. The video-01 model was launched in September 2024, and the current version is Hailuo 2.3 (Wikipedia).
MiniMax also has Speech 2.6 (text-to-speech with support for over 30 languages) and Music 2.0 — multimodal tools that few AI companies offer in a single package.
What each startup does differently
If you look from a distance, the three seem the same: Chinese AI startups with language models. But each occupies a distinct niche:
- Moonshot AI (Kimi): focus on long context and agents. Kimi K2.5 with native vision and the ability to perform autonomous tasks on websites positions the company in the AI agent race. Remains private.
- Z.ai (Zhipu/GLM): focus on hardware independence. It is the only one of the three that runs natively on 100% Chinese chips (Cambricon, Moore Threads, Huawei Ascend). With 800+ employees, it is the largest and most diversified. Already public.
- MiniMax: focus on applications for the end consumer. Talkie, Hailuo AI, music and video generation. It is the company with the most user traction outside of China. Also already public.
Accessibility for Brazilian developers
This is the practical part. If you work with technology in Brazil, what can you use from these companies today?
Moonshot AI / Kimi: the company offers API through the platform platform.moonshot.cn. Access is mainly aimed at the Chinese market and often requires registration with a Chinese phone number. The Kimi chatbot is available at kimi.moonshot.cn for direct use. For Brazilian developers, the entry barrier is medium — documentation is mostly in Chinese.
Z.ai / Zhipu: the platform bigmodel.cn offers access to GLM model APIs. After rebranding to Z.ai, the company expanded its international presence with offices in the Middle East, UK, Singapore, and Malaysia (Wikipedia). The GLM models have open-source versions available on Hugging Face, which facilitates experimentation without depending on the Chinese API. The GLM-4.5 Air is a lightweight option for those who want to test.
MiniMax: it is the most accessible of the three for Brazilians. The platform minimax.io has an English interface. Hailuo AI (hailuoai.video) allows direct video generation from the browser. Talkie works globally. Text, voice, and video APIs are available for international developers.
In terms of open source, Z.ai contributes the most — the GLM models are available for download and fine-tuning. MiniMax published the MiniMax-01 with open weights in January 2025. Moonshot keeps its models more closed.
The geopolitical context that affects everything
We can't talk about these companies without mentioning the elephant in the room: the US-China tech war. Zhipu is already on the American Entity List. In February 2026, Anthropic accused both Moonshot AI and MiniMax of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude to train their own models — a process called "distillation" (Wikipedia, Wikipedia).
These accusations add a risk factor for those who adopt these tools: regulations can change quickly. For Brazilian developers, the safest strategy is to use open-weight models that can run locally, regardless of what happens between Washington and Beijing.
Why this matters to Brazil
The Chinese AI ecosystem is diversifying at a speed that Brazil barely keeps up with. While most Brazilian developers know OpenAI, Google, and maybe DeepSeek, there are at least three other companies — two of them already public in Hong Kong — producing competitive models with accessible APIs and, in several cases, open-source code.
Moonshot AI is valued at US$3.8 billion. Z.ai and MiniMax are listed on the stock exchange. JPMorgan is recommending their stocks. They are not experimental projects — they are companies that are shaping how AI will work in the coming years.
For Brazilian startups that depend on AI APIs, knowing these alternatives is not curiosity — it is a competitive advantage. Especially when the price war between Chinese providers is lowering the cost of access to cutting-edge models.
This type of analysis is featured in China to Watch, the newsletter that maps what happens in China before it becomes news in Brazil. Subscribe at chinato.watch.
