MiniMax

What it is

MiniMax (Chinese name 稀宇科技) is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops foundation models for text, speech and video, and builds consumer applications on top of them. It is headquartered in Xinyan Mansion in Shanghai's Xuhui District^[1]. A foundation model is a large model trained on broad data that can then be adapted or called for many downstream tasks; companies like MiniMax both serve such models to developers and use them to power their own apps.

Origins

MiniMax was founded in Shanghai in December 2021 by computer-vision researchers who came from SenseTime^[1]. Wikipedia lists Yan Junjie as chief executive, together with Yun Yeyi and Zhou Yucong, as founders^[1]. The company takes its name from the minimax algorithm in game theory, which walks a tree of possible moves under the assumption that the opponent also plays optimally and picks the branch that keeps the worst-case loss as small as possible^[1]. One early backer was the game developer miHoYo^[1].

The model line

MiniMax has shipped models on a steady cadence. abab1 appeared in April 2022 and abab 6.5 in April 2024. MiniMax-01 followed in January 2025, and in April 2025 the company released Speech-02, a text-to-speech system covering more than 30 languages; text-to-speech means turning written text into spoken audio. MiniMax-M1 came in June 2025, then M2.5 in February 2026, M2.7 in March 2026 and M3 in June 2026^[1]. Its organisation on Hugging Face, a site where model weights and demos are published, also lists MiniMax-H3 from July 2026 and MiniMax-Music3 from August 2026^[2].

Consumer products

Alongside models sold to developers, MiniMax runs a line of consumer apps: Glow in 2022, Talkie in June 2023, Xingye in September 2023 and Hailuo AI in March 2024^[1]. Hailuo AI's video-01 model launched in September 2024^[1].

Funding and listing

In March 2024 Alibaba led a US$600 million round at a US$2.5 billion valuation; other investors included GL Ventures, HongShan, IDG Capital and Tencent^[1]. MiniMax listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 9 January 2026 under ticker 100^[1]. Caixin reported that the shares rose 42.67% from their HK$165 issue price on the debut, valuing the company at HK$71.9 billion^[3]. For 2025 the company reported revenue of US$79.038 million and a net loss of about US$1.87 billion, with 415 employees^[1].

Disputes

In September 2025, Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery sued MiniMax in the United States over Hailuo AI^[1]. In February 2026, Anthropic accused MiniMax and two other Chinese companies of distilling its Claude models through fraudulent accounts^[1]. Distillation here means training a model on another model's outputs rather than on original data.

Where it stands

MiniMax belongs to the group of Chinese model developers that combine published model releases, consumer apps and public-market funding; its Hugging Face presence^[2] and its Hong Kong listing^[1][3] are both part of that picture.