MiniMax — Chinese Company Competing with Efficient MoE Models

A company with fewer than 400 employees, its revenue didn’t exceed $79 million in 2025, yet its shares listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange rose 109% on the first trading day. This picture summarizes MiniMax — the Chinese company least known outside China and the most surprising to expectations within it.

Founding and Seeds

MiniMax was founded in December 2021 in Shanghai by several former researchers from SenseTime, a computer‑vision technology company. Principal founder Yan Junjie and participants Yang Bin and Zhou Yucong established a company called “Xiyu Technology” (), with the brand name MiniMax.

In its early days, it received funding from MiHoYo — the famous Chinese game studio behind Genshin Impact — giving it a unique connection to the digital‑creation industry from day one.

Funding Growth

Rapid start in bolstering its financial position:

• 2022‑2023: Early rounds from Hillhouse Investment, HongShan (Sequoia China), IDG Capital, and Tencent
• March 2024: $600‑million round led by Alibaba with a $2.5‑billion valuation — the largest investment until that moment
• January 2026: Initial public offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at HK$165 per share, raising about $700 million total

The first trading day was remarkable: the stock opened with a gain exceeding 61%, later reaching 109% above the offering price, lifting market value to over HK$100 billion. The public offering was oversubscribed 1837 times in the retail segment.

Main Products

Talkie (Xingye in China) is an app for interacting with AI characters. The user converses with fictional characters of all kinds — friends, historical figures, fantasy characters. This type of app targets a broad segment that doesn’t find a simple entry point to AI in abstract technical tools.

Hailuo AI is an AI video‑generation platform. Hailuo 02, launched in June 2025, received wide acclaim for output quality and generated‑video length. In September 2025, the new Seedream 4.0 was launched. It competes directly with Sora, Runway, and Veo.

MiniMax Audio for audio generation and voice cloning. The T2A‑01‑HD model masters audio generation in 17 languages and can clone a voice from just 10 seconds of recording.

Open Platform is a programming interface for developers and enterprises providing access to foundational models. By September 2025, 130,000 enterprise customers from over 100 countries.

Technical Models

MiniMax‑Text‑01, launched in January 2025, is a 456‑billion‑parameter text model with a 4‑million‑token context window — equivalent to about five copies of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” According to company claims, it surpasses Gemini 2.0 Flash on MMLU and SimpleQA.

MiniMax‑VL‑01 is a multimodal model handling images and text, approaching Claude 3.5 Sonnet on ChartQA according to internal benchmarks.

MiniMax‑M1 (or M2) is the current frontier model powering Open Platform services.

The MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture adopted in the models allows only a portion of parameters to be activated per query, reducing inference costs. According to company figures, the abab 6.5 model delivers performance within 5% of leading U.S. models at only 1% of the cost.

User Base and Revenue

212 million users in over 200 countries and regions by September 2025. 70% of revenue is generated outside China — a notable indicator for a Chinese AI‑specialized company.

Revenue: $10 million in 2024, jumping to $70–79 million in 2025 — 7–8× growth. Gross profit margin 69.4% — a high figure reflecting efficiency in a business model built on subscriptions and API.

The number of paying users grew from 119,700 in 2023 to 650,300 in 2024 to 1.77 million in the first nine months of 2025.

Challenges

The company’s small size compared to competitors forms a real constraint: what Anthropic spends training a single model might equal MiniMax’s total revenue for years. U.S. export restrictions on chips constrain training capabilities.

A legal dispute with Wuhu Diezhi over content ownership went to court in July 2025. Acquisition of Luying Technology in March 2025 consolidated audio products but added operational complexity.

Post‑IPO Trajectory

The IPO changes MiniMax’s equations: it’s now obliged to periodic disclosure and subject to investor scrutiny, narrowing the maneuvering margin available to private startups. The raised funds provide financial ammunition to expand training capabilities and expand into foreign markets.

The open question is whether MiniMax can transition from consumer products like Talkie — which consume service resources without a clear profit model — to the enterprise sector that generates stable returns. 2025 figures indicate an ongoing transition, but the distance to becoming a heavyweight player in the global enterprise ecosystem remains substantial.

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