MiniMax
Headquarters
Shanghai, ChinaFounded
2021CEO / Founder
Yan JunjieEmployees
201-500Funding
Public — $1.77BStock
0100.HKProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.3/10Website
www.minimax.io/
Profile updated
About MiniMax
MiniMax (MiniMax Group Inc.) is an artificial intelligence company headquartered in Shanghai, founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie and a team of computer vision researchers from SenseTime. The company develops multimodal foundation models supporting text, audio, image, video, and music processing, distributed through its own consumer applications and an enterprise API platform.
Its products include Hailuo AI (text-to-video and image generation), MiniMax M3 (a large language model with a one-million-token context window), Talkie (an AI character chat application), MiniMax Speech 2.8 (text-to-speech), and MiniMax Music. As of 2025, MiniMax technology served more than 300 million individual users across more than 200 countries and over one million enterprise clients and developers.
MiniMax raised approximately $1.15 billion in private funding across six rounds before its IPO, including a $600 million round led by Alibaba Group in March 2024 at a $2.5 billion valuation. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX: 0100) in January 2026, raising HK$4.8 billion ($618 million). As of early 2026, the company employed approximately 415 people.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by MiniMax
All products by MiniMax reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores MiniMax
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed MiniMax's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.8 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who MiniMax competes with, and how they differ.
Chinese frontier-model rival focused purely on text LLMs and low-cost reasoning (R1/V3) with no consumer video or companion-chat apps; MiniMax open-sourced M1 in June 2025 explicitly claiming a FLOPs efficiency edge over DeepSeek R1.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedBeijing-based "AI tiger" that listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange one day before MiniMax (Jan 8 vs Jan 9, 2026); analysts characterize Zhipu as enterprise- and government-oriented versus MiniMax's consumer-app-led growth story (Hailuo, Talkie).
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
US text-to-video generator competing directly with Hailuo AI on short-form AI video generation, positioned as a standalone creative/social tool rather than part of a broader multimodal foundation-model platform.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Dream Machine competes directly with Hailuo on text/image-to-video generation; industry coverage groups Hailuo in the same mid-tier bracket as Luma and Pika, below top-tier Sora/Veo.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
One of the original text-to-video pioneers (Gen-2/Gen-3), targeting professional film and VFX workflows at higher price points than Hailuo's consumer-first, credit-based pricing.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedNewer entrant focused on cinematic camera-motion and image-to-video effects for social content, overlapping with Hailuo's consumer video-generation use case.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in MiniMax's history, with sources.
- Milestone
Lists on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (0100.HK); shares double on debut
MiniMax priced its IPO at HK$165 per share and raised HK$4.8 billion (about US$620 million). Shares closed the first trading day up 109.1% at HK$345, valuing the company at HK$106.7 billion (about US$13.7 billion).
scmp.com - Milestone
Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery sue MiniMax over Hailuo AI
The three studios filed a copyright-infringement suit in California federal court alleging Hailuo AI let users generate images and videos of copyrighted characters, including Darth Vader, Minions and Wonder Woman, without authorization.
claimsjournal.com - Launch
Open-sources MiniMax-M1 reasoning model
MiniMax released MiniMax-M1 under an Apache 2.0 license with a 1-million-token context window, reporting a $534,700 training cost and claiming a FLOPs efficiency edge over DeepSeek's R1 model.
venturebeat.com - Launch
Launches Hailuo AI text-to-video model (Video-01)
MiniMax unveiled Video-01, a text-to-video generation model available via its Hailuo AI platform, at its first developer conference in Shanghai; generated videos run up to six seconds.
scmp.com - Funding
Series B — $600M led by Alibaba at $2.5B+ valuation
Alibaba Group led a financing round of at least $600 million, joined by HongShan, Tencent, IDG Capital and Hillhouse, valuing MiniMax at more than $2.5 billion.
fortune.com - Funding
Series A — $250M+ at approximately $1.2B valuation
MiniMax closed a round of more than $250 million, bringing in a Tencent-backed entity as a new investor alongside early backers miHoYo, Yunqi Partners and Future Capital, at a reported valuation of about $1.2 billion.
verdict.co.uk - Founded
Founded in Shanghai by SenseTime alumni
MiniMax was founded in December 2021 in Shanghai by Yan Junjie and fellow computer-vision researchers from SenseTime.
scmp.com
Explore AI Software Reviews
Browse multi-perspective AI panel reviews across hundreds of AI tools, agents, and platforms. Find the right software with insights from CTO, Developer, Marketer, Finance, and User perspectives.