Moonshot AI is in the early stages of considering an initial public offering in Hong Kong to tap investors’ growing fascination with AI, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Beijing-based firm behind chatbot Kimi has held talks with China International Capital Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc about working on an offering, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The timing of a potential IPO is uncertain, they said.

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Other AI firms such as Zhipu and MiniMax Group Inc have soared since their listings in Hong Kong in January, with both now valued at roughly $40 billion.

Moonshot’s deliberations are ongoing and might not result in an IPO, the people said. Representatives for Moonshot and Goldman declined to comment. CICC didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Moonshot has been tapping private markets for capital, leveraging growing investor appetite for its publicly traded peers. The company is already in discussions about raising as much as $1 billion in funding after securing more than $700 million in a round earlier this year, people familiar with the talks have said. The expanded round would value the company at about $18 billion, Bloomberg News reported.

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Moonshot was founded by former Tsinghua University professor Yang Zhilin. Its backers include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd and 5Y Capital. The company released an upgrade of its flagship Kimi AI model in January. Known as K2.5, it can process text, images and videos simultaneously from a single prompt, and it also powers Kimi Claw, Moonshot’s version of AI agent OpenClaw.