Already giving options before graduation: The Dark Side of the Moon launches the "Time Travel Plan," locking in top talent from the 27th cohort a year in advance

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, the AI startup Moonshot AI (Kimi’s parent company) is about to launch a campus recruitment program called “the Crossing Plan,” targeting the Class of 2027 graduates, with the first batch of 16 openings. Those selected, after passing an internship evaluation lasting 3 to 6 months, will be directly granted company equity while they have not officially graduated yet. The program is not limited to any job type, and there are no hard requirements regarding major, education, or experience.

Granting equity to non-graduated interns is relatively uncommon in the industry. Internet and AI companies typically only provide equity incentives to full-time employees. The core appeal of Moonshot AI’s move lies in the rapid increase in its option unit price: in November last year, the company’s valuation was about $4 billion; since then, driven by its new model K2.5 entering the international top ranks and the market optimism brought by OpenClaw, it completed three rounds of financing within three months, with valuation rising to $18 billion and the option unit price increasing by more than 4 times.

Moonshot AI currently has about 300 employees, with an extremely flat organizational structure—no job grades or OKRs, and a highly simplified reporting line. Founder Yang Zhilin once flew from Beijing to Shenzhen to recruit a technical talent, chatting for ten hours and then catching an early flight back. Another talent case from the company that has recently drawn attention is a 17-year-old high school intern, Chen Guangyu, who is a co-first author of the Kimi Attention Residuals paper, a paper that was publicly liked by Musk.