One of China's 'AI Tigers' — the multimodal foundation-model lab behind Talkie and Hailuo AI
HQ: Shanghai, China | Founded: 2021 | Employees: ~1,000 (2026, est.) | Stage: Public (HKEX, January 2026) | Website: https://www.minimax.io
MiniMax was founded in 2021 in Shanghai by Yan Junjie, a veteran of SenseTime who believed China's next big AI company should build a full-stack AGI lab with a product-first orientation. The company became one of China's six 'AI Tigers' — the privately funded foundation-model leaders (with Zhipu, Moonshot, Baichuan, StepFun, and 01.AI) that raced to match the frontier after DeepSeek and the open-source wave.\n\nMiniMax's differentiation is multimodal depth: its models natively handle text, audio, video, and music, and the company shipped consumer products early and aggressively. Talkie — an AI companion and roleplay app launched in 2023 — became a global hit with roughly 20 million monthly active users and drives the majority of consumer revenue (C-side products generated ~71% of revenue in 2025). Hailuo AI established MiniMax as a serious text-to-video player, often topping third-party leaderboards alongside Kling and Sora-class models.\n\nFinancially, MiniMax grew fast but burned heavily: 2025 revenue was ~$79M with an operating loss of ~$1.87B, then H1 2026 revenue nearly quadrupled year-over-year to $116.6M, and Sacra estimated annualized revenue reached ~$800M by August 2026. The company raised roughly $1.4B privately (including a $735M round at a $2.9B valuation), then listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8, 2026 — raising $619M at a ~$6.5B valuation after pricing at the top of the range, with shares doubling on debut amid enormous retail demand.
MiniMax is the most product-driven of China's 'AI Tigers': while rivals led with chat assistants, MiniMax built Talkie — an AI companion app with ~20M monthly active users and meaningful global consumer revenue — and Hailuo AI, one of the best text-to-video generators on the market. That consumer product engine, powered by proprietary multimodal models (text, audio, video, music), drove an early-mover advantage and a headline HKEX IPO in January 2026: $619M raised at ~$6.5B, shares doubling on debut, with revenue accelerating to an estimated $800M annualized by August 2026. The bull case is multimodal differentiation and proven consumer monetization; the bear case is brutal Chinese competition (DeepSeek, Zhipu, Moonshot, ByteDance), heavy losses (operating loss of ~$1.87B in 2025), and the volatility of consumer AI companion demand.
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