MiniMax AI

In December 2021, while SenseTime was preparing its landmark Hong Kong IPO, one of its youngest vice presidents quietly handed in his resignation. Yan Junjie — mathematician, AI engineer, avid gamer — had watched a bot defeat world-class Dota 2 players in 2019 and became consumed by a single question: could general intelligence be engineered, methodically, like a product? The company he founded in the final days of 2021, a full year before ChatGPT launched, is now called MiniMax.

What MiniMax Actually Builds

MiniMax is one of the few AI companies anywhere that has built frontier models across every major modality from scratch: text (the MiniMax-Text-01 at 456 billion parameters with a 4-million-token context window), video (Hailuo-02 generating 1080p clips with physics-consistent camera controls), speech (Speech-02 supporting 40+ languages with sub-second latency), and music (Music-01 composing 4-minute songs with vocals). This vertical integration is not an accident — it is the strategic bet that quality control and margin improvement require owning the full stack. By end of 2025, MiniMax's speech model had generated over 200 million hours of audio globally; its video models had produced 600 million clips.

Products and Traction

Consumer-facing, the company runs Talkie — an AI companion app that by mid-2024 ranked as the fourth most-downloaded AI app in the United States, surpassing Character.AI, with 11 million monthly active users. By December 2024, Talkie's MAU had grown to nearly 30 million. The Hailuo AI video platform similarly accelerated after its September 2024 launch. On the enterprise side, MiniMax's Open Platform serves 214,000 developers and enterprise customers across 100+ countries, offering API access at pricing it positions as a fraction of comparable Western models — the M2.5 API costs approximately 8% of Claude Sonnet's equivalent rate.

The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 9, 2026, with shares more than doubling on debut day — the only Hong Kong tech IPO in four years to achieve that milestone — and oversubscribed 1,838 times. Full-year 2025 revenue reached $79 million, more than doubling from $30.5 million in 2024, driven by Hailuo AI monetization and enterprise API adoption. Gross margin improved from 12.2% in 2024 to 25.4% in 2025, reflecting model efficiency gains. As of December 2025, MiniMax had served 236 million cumulative users across 200+ countries.