MiniMax

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MiniMax
上海稀宇科技有限公司 (Shanghai Xiyu Technology Co., Ltd.)
MiniMax logo
Type Private
Industry Artificial intelligence
Founded December 2021
Founders Yan Junjie (闫俊杰)
Yang Bin (杨斌)
Zhou Yucong (周雨丛)
Headquarters Shanghai, China
Key people Yan Junjie (CEO and Founder)
Wei Wei (Legal Representative)
Parent Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd.
Products Talkie
Hailuo AI (海螺AI)
MiniMax Chat
Hai Luo (海螺)
ABAB series
MiniMax-01 series
MiniMax-M1
Speech-02
Music-01
Revenue $70 million (2024)[1]


Valuation $4+ billion (2025 IPO target)[2]
Employees 100+ (2023)
Website minimaxi.com

MiniMax (Chinese: 上海稀宇科技有限公司, Shanghai Xiyu Technology Co., Ltd.) is a private artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in Shanghai, China. Founded in December 2021 by former SenseTime executives, the company has been dubbed one of China's "AI Tiger" companies by investors as of 2024.[3] MiniMax develops large language models, multimodal AI systems, and consumer-facing AI applications. As of 2025, MiniMax's products have served over 157 million individual users across over 200 countries and regions, and more than 50,000 enterprises and developers across over 90 countries and regions.[2]

History

Founding and Early Development

MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by several computer vision veterans from SenseTime:[4][5]

  • Yan Junjie (闫俊杰) - Former Vice President at SenseTime, responsible for building deep learning toolchains and underlying algorithms, now serves as CEO
  • Yang Bin (杨斌) - Previously co-founded the research center for Uber Advanced Technologies Group and worked at Waabi
  • Zhou Yucong (周雨丛) - Former head of algorithms R&D at SenseTime

When it first started out, MiniMax received funding from MiHoYo, the Chinese video game developer known for Genshin Impact.[6]

Funding Rounds

MiniMax has successfully raised significant funding through multiple rounds:

Funding History
Date Round Amount Lead Investor(s) Post-Money Valuation Reference
June 2023 Series A $250+ million Tencent-backed entity and others ~$1.2 billion [6]
March 2024 Series B $600 million Alibaba Group ~$2.5 billion [7][8]
July 2025 Undisclosed ~$300 million Multiple (reported) >$4 billion [9]
Total Raised $1.15+ billion

Other investors include Hillhouse Investment, HongShan Capital Group (formerly Sequoia China), IDG Capital, Vitalbridge Capital, GL Ventures, and the Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.[7][8]

IPO Plans

On July 16, 2025, Reuters reported that MiniMax had confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, aiming to raise between HK$4 billion and HK$5 billion (US$510-637 million) and targeting a valuation above US$4 billion. CICC and UBS were named as sponsors for the listing.[2][10]

Products and Services

Consumer Applications

Glow and Its Successors

MiniMax's first product was Glow, launched in October 2022, which allowed users to create virtual characters, give them background stories and chat with them about various topics. Within four months of launch, the app had over 5 million users. Due to filing issues, Glow was terminated in March 2023.[11]

Glow was relaunched under two new brands:

  • Talkie for international markets (June 2023)
  • Xing Ye (星野) for the Chinese market (September 2023)

For June 2024, Talkie ranked fifth among the most-downloaded free entertainment apps in the U.S., with more than half of its 11 million monthly active users in the U.S. Other popular markets included the Philippines, the U.K., and Canada.[12] The app features AI avatars of public figures, including Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and LeBron James.[13]

Talkie was pulled from Apple's App Store in December 2024 for unspecified "technical" reasons but later returned.[13]

Hailuo AI (海螺AI)

Launched in March 2024, Hailuo AI is a multimodal large language model consumer platform that provides AI text, video, and music-generating features. Key releases include:

  • Video-01: A text-to-video model launched in September 2024
  • T2V-01-Director and I2V-01-Director: Models released on January 28, 2025, designed to revolutionize video creation with professional filmmaking tools
  • Audio functions launched on January 20, 2025[14]

Hai Luo (海螺) Productivity Tool

Hai Luo is an AI-powered productivity and copilot tool, similar to Microsoft Copilot. It can perform tasks like document summarization, content creation, and code generation. It supports processing long documents up to 200,000 words.[15]

AI Models

MiniMax has developed several significant AI models:

MiniMax AI Model Portfolio
Model Name Type Release Date Key Features
ABAB 5 LLM August 2023 Foundation for AI chatbot and productivity tools
ABAB 6 Mixture of experts (MoE) January 2024 1 trillion parameters (claimed), comparable to GPT-4 on certain benchmarks[16]
ABAB 6.5 Mixture of experts April 17, 2024 First major mixture of experts model from MiniMax
MiniMax-Text-01 Text-only LLM January 2025 456 billion parameters, 4 million token context window[17]
MiniMax-VL-01 Multimodal LLM January 2025 Visual and text understanding capabilities[17]
Speech-02 Text-to-speech April 2025 Supports 30+ languages, processes up to 200,000 characters[14]
MiniMax-M1 Hybrid-attention reasoning June 2025 Open-weight model with 1 million token context support, uses 30% of computing power compared to DeepSeek R1[18]
Music-01 Music generation 2025 Music generation capabilities[14]

Technical Achievements

MiniMax-M1

MiniMax-M1, released in June 2025, represents a breakthrough in computational efficiency. The entire reinforcement learning phase used only 512 H800s for three weeks, with a rental cost of just $534,700. The model requires just 30% of the computing power needed by rival DeepSeek's R1 model when performing deep reasoning tasks.[18]

API and Enterprise Services

MiniMax provides enterprise API services through its Open API Platform, serving over 50,000 enterprises and developers globally. The company offers competitive pricing, with input processing costing just $0.4 per million tokens for contexts up to 200,000 tokens, rising to $1.3 per million tokens for the full 1-million-token capability.[14]

Corporate Structure

MiniMax operates through its parent company, Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. (上海稀宇极智科技有限公司), which was established in 2021. The company is a subsidiary of MiniMax HONGKONG Limited with 100% ownership.[19]

Market Position

AI Tigers Classification

MiniMax is considered one of China's "AI Tigers" (also known as "AI Dragons"), a designation for leading Chinese AI startups. Other companies in this category include:[3]

Industry Outlook

In 2024, MiniMax founder Yan Junjie predicted that "in the future, there will only be five large model companies left in the world," noting that the ratio of the AI market between internet companies and AI startups may reach 9:1, more extreme than the 6:4 ratio seen in the transition from internet to mobile internet.[20]

Controversies

Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

In September 2025, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and NBCUniversal filed a joint copyright infringement lawsuit against MiniMax and its parent company Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co. Ltd., alleging "willful and brazen" copyright infringement through its Hailuo AI service. The studios alleged that MiniMax markets Hailuo AI as a "Hollywood studio in your pocket" and built its business from intellectual property stolen from Hollywood studios.[21][22]

In December 2024, Broadcast magazine reported that Hailuo AI can reproduce the logos of British television channels Channel 4, Channel 5, and ITV in its AI-generated videos.[23]

Other Legal Issues

MiniMax is reportedly being sued by iQiyi, a Chinese video streaming service that alleges MiniMax illicitly trained on iQiyi's copyrighted recordings.[24]

Technical Infrastructure

Open Source Strategy

In January 2025, MiniMax released its MiniMax-01 model family, including weights and code. CEO Yan Junjie admitted he would have gone open-source from day one if he could choose again, as the decision invites developer collaboration while showcasing technical capabilities.[25]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "MiniMax Stock Price, Funding, Valuation, Revenue". CB Insights. 2024. https://www.cbinsights.com/company/minimax-ai/financials.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Chinese AI firm MiniMax targets $4 billion-plus valuation in Hong Kong IPO, sources say". Reuters. July 16, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-ai-firm-minimax-files-confidentially-hong-kong-ipo-sources-say-2025-07-16/.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Alibaba-Backed 'AI Dragon' MiniMax Plans Hong Kong IPO". Bloomberg. June 19, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-18/alibaba-backed-ai-dragon-minimax-is-said-to-plan-hong-kong-ipo.
  4. ↑ "MiniMax scores big new funds, but likely to need more in expensive AI race". Bamboo Works. June 6, 2023. https://thebambooworks.com/minimax-scores-big-new-funds-but-likely-to-need-more-in-expensive-ai-race/.
  5. ↑ "Meet MiniMax: The Chinese Tech Company Touted by Nvidia's Jensen Huang". Asia Tech Lens. July 30, 2025. https://www.asiatechlens.com/p/meet-minimax-the-chinese-tech-company.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "China AI startup MiniMax raising over $250 million from Tencent-backed entity, others". Reuters. June 1, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-ai-startup-minimax-raising-over-250-mln-tencent-backed-entity-others-2023-06-01/.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "China's AI startup MiniMax raises $600 mln, led by Alibaba". Reuters. March 12, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ai-startup-minimax-raises-600-mln-led-by-alibaba-2024-03-12/.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Alibaba Leads Funding in $2.5 Billion China AI Startup MiniMax". Bloomberg. March 12, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/alibaba-leads-funding-in-2-5-billion-china-ai-startup-minimax.
  9. ↑ "Chinese AI firm MiniMax raises $300m, gains $4b valuation". Tech in Asia. July 15, 2025. https://www.techinasia.com/news/chinese-ai-firm-minimax-raises-300m-gains-4b-valuation.
  10. ↑ "MiniMax, the 'world-class' AI start-up lauded by Jensen Huang, applies for Hong Kong IPO". South China Morning Post. July 16, 2025. https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3318485/minimax-world-class-ai-start-lauded-jensen-huang-applies-hong-kong-ipo.
  11. ↑ "China's AI chatbot frenzy sees start-ups MiniMax and Baichuan release new foundation models after Beijing's approval". South China Morning Post. September 7, 2023. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3233897/chinas-ai-chatbot-frenzy-sees-start-ups-minimax-and-baichuan-release-new-foundation-models.
  12. ↑ "One of America's Hottest Entertainment Apps Is Chinese-Owned". The Wall Street Journal. July 27, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/one-of-americas-hottest-entertainment-apps-is-chinese-owned-04257355.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Chinese-owned Character.ai rival vanishes from US App Store". South China Morning Post. December 20, 2024. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3291715/chinese-owned-characterai-rival-vanishes-us-app-store.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 "About MiniMax". MiniMax. https://www.minimaxi.com/about.
  15. ↑ "MiniMax launches new AI assistant "Hai Luo", supports 200,000-word super-long text processing". 36Kr. February 1, 2024. https://36kr.com/p/2627038590664585.
  16. ↑ "国产AI大模型公司MiniMax亮出万亿参数MoE模型ABAB-6". ITHome. January 16, 2024. https://www.ithome.com/0/745/778.htm.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Chinese AI company MiniMax releases new models it claims are competitive with the industry's best". TechCrunch. January 16, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/chinese-ai-company-minimax-releases-new-models-it-claims-are-competitive-with-the-industrys-best/.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 "China's MiniMax launches M1: A reasoning model to rival GPT-4 at 0.5% the cost". Computerworld. June 18, 2025. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4008870/chinas-minimax-launches-m1-a-reasoning-model-to-rival-gpt-4-at-0-5-the-cost.html.
  19. ↑ "MiniMax AI Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors". PitchBook. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/528653-35.
  20. ↑ "Yan Junjie, founder of MiniMax: In the future, there will only be five large model companies left in the world". iNEWS. 2024. https://inf.news/en/economy/dc6e547f86ef345130c53745d1b71948.html.
  21. ↑ "Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCU Sue Chinese AI Company MiniMax, Alleging It 'Pirates and Plunders' Studios' Copyrighted Works on 'Massive Scale'". Variety. September 16, 2025. https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-warner-bros-discovery-nbcu-lawsuit-minimax-chinese-ai-company-1236520395/.
  22. ↑ "Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. Sue Chinese AI Startup MiniMax". Bloomberg. September 16, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-16/disney-universal-warner-bros-sue-chinese-ai-startup-minimax.
  23. ↑ "Hailuo AI reproduces channel logos". Broadcast. December 2024. https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/tech/hailuo-ai-reproduces-channel-logos/5199921.article.
  24. ↑ "iQiyi sues MiniMax over copyright claims". Reuters. 2025. https://www.reuters.com/legal/iqiyi-sues-minimax-copyright-2025/.
  25. ↑ "Chinese AI start-up MiniMax releases low-cost open-source models that rival top chatbots". South China Morning Post. January 15, 2025. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3294900/chinese-ai-start-minimax-releases-low-cost-open-source-models-rival-top-chatbots.

External links

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