MiniMax

MiniMax is a global AI foundation model company founded in early 2022, according to its own about page. The company says it is committed to advancing the frontiers of AI toward artificial general intelligence under the mission "Intelligence with Everyone."^[1]

MiniMax builds proprietary multimodal models, including MiniMax M3, MiniMax H3, Speech 2.8 and Music 3.0, that understand and generate text, audio, images, video and music. The company says these models power its AI-native products, including MiniMax Code, MiniMax Design, MiniMax Audio and Talkie, plus an enterprise and developer-facing Open API Platform.^[1],[2]

MiniMax's M3 model, introduced in June 2026, has 427 billion parameters and can process prompts of up to 1 million tokens, according to SiliconANGLE. The outlet reported that MiniMax credits a technique it calls MiniMax Sparse Attention, which reduces how often the model shifts data between a GPU's SRAM and HBM memory, for making M3's prefill and decode steps nine and 15 times faster than its predecessor.^[2]

MiniMax listed its shares in Hong Kong earlier in 2026 through a public offering that raised about $619 million, according to SiliconANGLE. The company's stock trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.^[2]

MiniMax raised about $2 billion in new funding reported by Bloomberg on July 10, 2026, with more than half coming from newly issued shares and the rest from convertible bonds, SiliconANGLE reported. MiniMax reportedly followed that raise by planning to sell $6.5 billion of zero-coupon convertible bonds due in 2027, convertible into 19.4 million shares priced 12.6% above the company's prior-day closing price; MiniMax shares closed 9.8% lower on the news.^[2]

Before its Hong Kong listing, MiniMax had raised around $850 million in venture capital and was valued at more than $2.5 billion, with Alibaba and Tencent among its backers, TechCrunch reported in January 2025.^[3]

MiniMax's board, as listed on its investor relations site, includes founder Dr. Yan Junjie as Chairman, plus directors Ms. Yun Yeyi, Mr. Liu Wei, Mr. Huang Guobin, Dr. Wang Pengcheng and Dr. Zhu Huaxing. The sources opened for this profile do not give MiniMax's market capitalization or current share price, so neither is reported here.^[4]

MiniMax was founded in early 2022 by Dr. Yan Junjie, according to its about page and investor relations site. Before founding MiniMax, Yan spent more than six years at SenseTime Group Inc., a Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed AI company, where he held positions including vice president and vice-head of its research institute.^[1],[5]

MiniMax's management page says Yan earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Southeast University in China in June 2010, then a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in July 2015, followed by post-doctoral research at Tsinghua University.^[5]

MiniMax debuted three new models, MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01 and T2A-01-HD, in January 2025, when TechCrunch described the company as a startup that had raised around $850 million and was valued at more than $2.5 billion. The company has since released additional model generations including M2, M3 and the H3 video model.^[3],[2],[1]

MiniMax's management team is led by Dr. Yan Junjie, 36, who serves as founder, Chairman of the Board, executive director, chief executive officer and chief technology officer, according to the company's investor relations site. Yan is described as responsible for overall management, board affairs, financial affairs, and strategy, particularly on AI research and development.^[5]

MiniMax's executive director and chief operating officer is Ms. Yun Yeyi, 31, who previously held several roles at SenseTime Group Inc., including manager of fundraising and strategic investment from September 2017 to August 2018 and director of innovative business from January 2021 to January 2022. Yun holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with additional majors in economics and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University.^[5]

MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie announced he would forgo his salary until the company develops artificial general intelligence, and pledged to give away 5% of his shares to finance employee incentives and open-source projects, The Information reported, as relayed by SiliconANGLE.^[2]

MiniMax's AI-native products and Open API Platform serve more than 2 million enterprises and developers across more than 100 countries and regions, according to the company's own about page and investor relations site. Separately, MiniMax's consumer-facing products and models have served more than 300 million individual users across more than 230 countries and regions.^[1],[6]

MiniMax counts Alibaba and Tencent among its investors, according to TechCrunch's January 2025 reporting, which described MiniMax as "Alibaba- and Tencent-backed." The sources opened for this profile do not name specific enterprise customers by name, so none is given here.^[3]

MiniMax competes with other Chinese AI model developers; TechCrunch's January 2025 article grouped MiniMax among Chinese firms releasing AI models that rival systems from OpenAI and other U.S.-based developers. A later TechCrunch article, published February 23, 2026, named DeepSeek and Moonshot AI alongside MiniMax as Chinese AI labs Anthropic accused of improperly using more than 24,000 fake accounts to extract Claude's capabilities through a technique called distillation, with MiniMax's own exchanges unspecified in the excerpt opened.^[3],[7]