Moonshot AI Delays Overseas Expansion, Product Manager Resigns to Start A Business

After last year’s frenzy and rush, the AI large model entrepreneurship has entered an adjustment period, one of the manifestations being more frequent personnel turnover among companies.

LatePost exclusively learned that several product managers from Moonshot AI have recently resigned to start their own businesses abroad.

In September this year, Moonshot AI decided to stop updating two overseas products that had already been launched – Ohai and Noisee, temporarily shrinking its overseas to-C applications. Moonshot AI responded that these two products were just experiments and not officially approved projects, so adjustments were quickly made; Moonshot AI proactively chose subtraction and focused more on developing Kimi.

Subsequently, over ten employees left Moonshot AI. At least 2 of them have started their own businesses and are in contact with investors.

Noisee’s former product manager Ming Chaoping (referred to as Leon within Moonshot AI) is progressing the fastest, and he is currently raising funds at a valuation of $50 million. He has already received investment intentions from two shareholders of Moonshot AI.

A $50 million angel investing valuation is not cheap. In early 2023, the threshold for the first round of financing for several large model companies was also around $50 million.

An investor who has been in contact with this project told us: “(This project) everyone is going crazy about it, and the valuation is no longer an angel investing valuation.” Another investor said: “It’s hard to say; I guess it’s all wrapped up by Moonshadow’s old shareholders.”

Noisee was a video generation product launched by Moonshot AI in January this year. Users can input a piece of text and a music link to get an AI-generated MV video. The related functions of Noisee have been migrated to Kimi, Moonshot AI’s flagship product since September.

People close to Moonshot AI believe that this is preparing for future multimodal products on Kimi. In June this year, Yang Zhilin told us that Moonshot AI will focus on doing well with Kimi as one product and brand.

Ming Chaoping joined Mooshot AI before as the product manager of the CapCut App under ByteDance. He joined Mooshot AI in the second half of last year as a product manager for Noisee.

According to public information, Ming Chaoping founded a company called Shenzhen Xinyanyima Technology Co., Ltd. We learned that its business direction is AI coding applications, benchmarked against Cursor.

Cursor is an intelligent code generation product from the United States. Its parent company Anysphere was established in 2022 and currently has a valuation of $25 billion, with an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) exceeding $50 million.

In September this year, OpenAI launched the o1 model which demonstrated powerful capabilities in programming-related tasks, better understanding and handling complex programming logic, algorithms, and code structures. This has increased developers’ trust and willingness to use AI coding.

“Cursor came out, o1 also improved programming abilities, igniting China’s AI coding track. Now many startups have emerged,” said an investor told us.

Several AI coding companies have emerged in China. aiXcoder, founded by Li Ge, a professor at the Computer Science School of Peking University, is one of the earliest companies in this field in China. Established in 2018, it recently raised funds with an estimated valuation of 1 billion RMB; AIGCode, founded by Su Wen, a former investor at China Growth Capital in January this year, has already received two rounds of financing; Babel, an application development tool that takes over the entire process was founded by Zhang Hailong, CEO of CODING – a developer tools SaaS company. Babel also received angel investing earlier this year.

The former product manager of Moonshot AI’s Ohai recently left to start his own business. Ohai is an emotional companion product similar to Character.ai launched overseas in February this year. This manager was involved in building the Musicl.ly product.

Musicl.ly is a short video application acquired by ByteDance in 2017. One of its founders Zhu Jun still works at ByteDance as Vice President for Strategic Development and currently leads Byte’s AI product team Flow. Seed (ByteDance’s large model research and development team) led by Zhu Wenjia – Technical Lead for TikTok products and Stone (AI Product Research Support Team) led by Hong Dingkun – Engineering Technology Lead for ByteDance are both supporting Flow’s AI products.

Since the beginning of this year there have been continuous departures from Moonshot AI including product engineers and developers who are leaving to pursue entrepreneurship with varying progress levels – some products have already launched overseas while others are still engaging with early investors.

Not only Moonshot AI but several other companies have seen personnel departures during the second half of this year as well. A group consisting mainly middle-to-senior level technical and product core members even saw changes such as switching teams or roles with many having spent less than a year at their current company.

Among those who left some returned to major corporations like ByteDance which has recruited several senior technical talents this year while others chose entrepreneurship instead. An investor mentioned: “Recently some senior staff from big model companies have left for startups.”

A technology professional who left Chinese large model company jokingly said: “In Beijing and Shanghai nowadays you can find countless AI entrepreneurs earning monthly salaries below 5000 yuan.”

SEE ALSO: Moonshot AI Responds to Founder Yang Zhilin Being Taken to Arbitration by Former Investors