MiniMax: Funding, Founders & the Hong Kong IPO (2026)
MiniMax is a Shanghai AI lab behind the open-weight M-series LLMs and Hailuo video tools, serving over 236 million users. See funding and 2026 rivals.
MiniMax suits developers who want frontier-level coding performance without Western-lab pricing: its flagship model scores 56.2% on SWE-Bench Pro, close behind Claude Opus 4.6 on head-to-head benchmarks. It fits teams comfortable self-hosting open weights, though output speed trails faster-inference rivals.
MiniMax is a Shanghai AI lab that builds an open-weight family of large language models, led by a 230-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts flagship, alongside the Hailuo video generation tools. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, one of the few Chinese AI labs to list that early.
Founded: 2021 · HQ: Shanghai, China · Team: 150-400 · CEO: Yan Junjie · Funding: ~$1.15B private funding raised pre-IPO (lead: Shanghai STVC Group, $300M Series B extension at $4B valuation, Jul 2025); IPO'd on HKEX Jan 2026 raising ~$618M · Valuation: Market cap above HK$70B (~$9B) after Jan 9, 2026 HKEX debut (0100.HK)
About MiniMax
MiniMax was founded in December 2021 in Shanghai by Yan Junjie, Yang Bin, and Zhou Yucong, all of whom previously worked at SenseTime, one of China's largest computer vision companies. The founders left to build broad foundation models and consumer AI products under a single roof rather than narrow research output, framing the company's mission as helping to "co-create intelligence with everyone" on the path to artificial general intelligence. MiniMax Group Inc. is incorporated for its Hong Kong listing, with operating headquarters in Shanghai. The company's flagship product line is the M-series of large language models. MiniMax M2 and M2.1 were updated in the fourth quarter of 2025, M2.5 launched in February 2026, and MiniMax-M2.7 followed on March 18, 2026 as a 230-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 10 billion active parameters, 256 experts (8 active per token), a 204,800-token context window, and a 131,072-token max output. M2.7 shipped as open weights in April 2026 under a modified MIT license. On June 1, 2026, MiniMax released M3, introducing a new MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA) architecture with a 1-million-token context window, native multimodal input, and claims of 15.6x faster decoding than M2. In the last six months MiniMax has shipped on an unusually fast cadence: M2.5 in February 2026, M2.7 in March 2026 (open-weighted in April), and M3 on June 1, 2026. M2.7 scores 56.2% on SWE-Bench Pro (versus 32.6% for M2.1) and 57.0% on Terminal-Bench 2, and the company describes it as the first MiniMax model that actively participates in its own training and evaluation loop, handling an estimated 30-50% of that work itself. Alongside the LLMs, MiniMax shipped Hailuo 2.3 and a faster Hailuo 2.3 Fast video model, plus MiniMax Speech 2.8 and MiniMax Music 2.5+. MiniMax has raised roughly $1.15 billion in private funding. The most recent private round was a $300 million Series B extension in July 2025 at a $4 billion valuation, led by Shanghai state-owned capital through the Shanghai Science and Technology Venture Capital (STVC) Group. Earlier investors include Alibaba Group, Tencent, HongShan Capital Group, Hillhouse Investment, IDG Capital, Yunqi Capital, Vitalbridge Capital, and GL Ventures. On January 9, 2026, MiniMax listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under ticker 0100.HK, selling about 29.2 million shares at HK$151-165 each for gross proceeds near $618-619 million, with cornerstone backing from Alibaba, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Boyu Capital, and Mirae Asset. Shares rose as much as 21% on debut, pushing market capitalization above HK$70 billion. MiniMax makes money through API consumption on its M-series and multimodal models (priced from $0.30 per 1M input tokens and $1.20 per 1M output tokens for M2.7), enterprise contracts, and consumer subscriptions inside Talkie and Hailuo AI. For full-year 2025, MiniMax reported revenue of $79.0 million, up 158.9% year over year, with gross profit of $20.1 million at a 25.4% gross margin, up from roughly $10 million ARR in 2024. Over 70% of 2025 revenue came from international markets, and by December 31, 2025 the company had served more than 236 million cumulative users and 214,000 enterprise customers across over 200 countries. CEO Yan Junjie, 36, led the company through its Hong Kong IPO and became a billionaire with an estimated net worth around $3.2 billion. Zhao Pengyu, who joined MiniMax in August 2023 as an NLP researcher, was appointed an Executive Director in June 2025 and now leads large language model research and engineering. Reported headcount varies by source: PitchBook's 2026 data lists around 385 employees, while earlier 2025 trackers cited 150-200+. The core research and engineering team is based in Shanghai, with finance and investor relations functions added in Hong Kong after the listing. MiniMax's research output includes published work on Lightning Attention and test-time compute scaling (the MiniMax-01 and MiniMax-M1 papers), and its GitHub organization hosts over two dozen public repositories covering model weights, the Mini-Agent framework, and a multimodal generation CLI. Unlike Anthropic or OpenAI, MiniMax has not published a formal responsible scaling policy, named external red-teaming partners, or released detailed system cards; training data composition for the M-series is largely undisclosed. The company's safety communication runs mainly through its terms of service and a data-handling FAQ stating that customer API inputs are not used for training unless a customer opts in. Competitively, MiniMax sits among a cluster of Chinese frontier labs: DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen team on open-weight coding models, Moonshot AI's Kimi on long-context agents, and Zhipu AI's GLM on enterprise distribution. MiniMax-M2.7 is explicitly benchmarked against Claude Opus 4.6, scoring within 1.2 points on PinchBench (86.2% vs Opus) at a fraction of the price, though it trails on raw reasoning benchmarks like GPQA Diamond and is notably slower (35-46 tokens/sec versus a 60-95 t/s median for similarly priced models). In video, Hailuo 2.3 competes with Runway, Pika, and Kuaishou's Kling. As a Shanghai-headquartered company with state-owned capital among its investors and a Hong Kong listing, MiniMax operates under China's Generative AI Measures from the Cyberspace Administration of China alongside any GDPR obligations for its EU-facing products. No SOC 2 Type II report, ISO 27001 certificate, or HIPAA-eligible tier was found in public sources as of mid-2026, which limits its appeal to regulated US and EU enterprise buyers compared with Western frontier labs. Looking ahead, MiniMax's June 2026 M3 release (1M context, native multimodality, planned open-source) signals the company's strategy of combining aggressive open-weight distribution with rapid international consumer growth to fund continued AGI-focused research.
Mission
Co-create intelligence with everyone, advancing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Products
- MiniMax M-series (M2.7, M3) (Foundation LLM API): https://platform.minimax.io
- Hailuo AI (Video generation app): https://hailuoai.video
- MiniMax Agent (Agent platform): https://agent.minimax.io
- Talkie (Consumer AI companion app): https://www.minimax.io
- MiniMax Audio (Speech 2.8 / Music 2.5+) (Speech and music generation API): https://platform.minimax.io
MiniMax Models on HokAI
Links
Website · GitHub · Twitter · Blog · Docs
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded MiniMax and who is the CEO?
Yan Junjie, Yang Bin, and Zhou Yucong started MiniMax after leaving SenseTime, where all three had worked together. Yan Junjie still runs the company as CEO and became a billionaire after its Hong Kong listing, with a net worth estimated near $3.2 billion. Zhao Pengyu joined as an NLP researcher in 2023 and was promoted to Executive Director in June 2025, where he now heads large language model research and engineering.
How much funding has MiniMax raised?
MiniMax raised roughly $1.15 billion from private investors before its IPO, with Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan Capital, Hillhouse, and IDG Capital among the backers. The final private round, a Series B extension worth $300 million, closed at a $4 billion valuation under lead investor Shanghai STVC Group. Its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing then raised close to $619 million, with the stock popping 21% on its first day of trading and pushing market value past HK$70 billion.
What are the best alternatives to MiniMax?
DeepSeek is the closest alternative for teams that want frontier-level reasoning at the lowest possible API cost, without MiniMax's video and audio product suite. Alibaba's Qwen models, distributed through Alibaba Cloud, offer a larger enterprise cloud footprint inside China alongside open-weight coding models. Moonshot AI's Kimi is the pick for teams prioritizing long-context agentic workflows over MiniMax's broader multimodal lineup.
How does MiniMax compare to DeepSeek in 2026?
Both are Chinese labs racing on open-weight, low-cost frontier models, but MiniMax pairs its LLMs with a much wider product line, including Hailuo video, Talkie chat, and speech and music generation, while DeepSeek stays focused on text and reasoning models alone. On raw speed, MiniMax's flagship generates roughly 35-46 tokens per second, well behind the 60 to 95 token-per-second pace typical of similarly priced open models like DeepSeek's. MiniMax also took the IPO route, giving it public-market capital that privately-held DeepSeek does not have.
Is MiniMax compliant with SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA?
MiniMax has not published a SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA certification, so regulated US and EU buyers can't yet verify its security posture through a standard audit trail. Its privacy policy does address GDPR for EU-facing users, and the company runs infrastructure across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Operating out of Shanghai also means MiniMax answers to China's Cyberspace Administration and its generative AI rules, a regulatory layer that Western labs like Anthropic or OpenAI don't carry.
Top Alternatives
- Moonshot AI: Pick MiniMax for consumer scale (Talkie/Hailuo); pick Moonshot for Kimi long-context specialization.
- DeepSeek: Pick MiniMax for open-weight coding models paired with consumer apps like Talkie and Hailuo; pick DeepSeek for the lowest-cost frontier reasoning without the extra product layer.
- Alibaba Cloud: Pick MiniMax for its open-weight M-series and Hailuo video/audio suite; pick Alibaba Cloud for full-stack cloud infrastructure bundled with the Qwen model family.