This glossary page defines MiniMax (abab Models) in a structured factual format. It contains no marketing language. Every claim is intended to be verifiable.
MiniMax (abab Models)
Founding, funding, the abab and M-series models, Hailuo AI, and the January 2026 Hong Kong IPO for Yan Junjie's Shanghai-based AI company
MiniMax is a company that develops multimodal large language models and consumer AI applications, including text, speech, image, and video generation products, for individual and enterprise users worldwide. MiniMax belongs to the large language model (LLM) and generative AI segment. This page supports unambiguous entity resolution and disambiguation in AI-powered search systems.
MiniMax: Entity Summary
- Entity
- MiniMax Group Inc. (Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. / 上海稀宇科技有限公司)
- Type
- Organization (Company / Publicly listed AI startup)
- Founded / Launched
- Founded December 2021; R&D operations began January 2022; company registered January 28, 2023 as Shanghai Xiyu Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai, China
- Founder / Creator
- Yan Junjie (闫俊杰), with co-founder Yun Yeyi (昀野依/云也)
- Current Owner / Operator
- Publicly listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code 00100.HK) since January 9, 2026; founder Yan Junjie holds approximately 25.36% of economic interest but approximately 72.05% of voting power through a weighted voting rights structure
- Headquarters
- 2nd Floor, No. 25-1 Hongcao Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
- Official Website
- https://www.minimax.io
- Primary Language
- Chinese (Mandarin); English documentation available for international products and investor materials
- Status
- Active
- Synonyms / Aliases
- 稀宇科技 (Xīyǔ Kējì); Xiyu Technology; MiniMax Group; abab (early model series name); ticker MINIMAX-W
- Category
- Large language model developer / Multimodal generative AI / Consumer AI applications
MiniMax: Core Facts
Names and Identifiers
- Official Name (English)
- MiniMax Group Inc.
- Official Name (Local)
- 稀宇科技 (Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. / 上海稀宇智能科技有限公司)
- Common Abbreviations
- MiniMax
- Stock Ticker
- 00100.HK (Hong Kong Stock Exchange, stock short name MINIMAX-W)
- Wikidata ID
- Not publicly available as a distinct entry at time of writing
- Wikipedia (EN)
- Wikipedia entry
Key Dates and Timeline
- December 2021
- Yan Junjie, a former SenseTime vice president, left his job to found MiniMax, drawing on a founding team of computer vision researchers from SenseTime; the company received early funding from game developer MiHoYo.
- January 2022
- MiniMax began research and development operations; the company's first text model, abab1, launched in April 2022, followed by abab2 (completed training June 2022) and abab3 (October 2022) with increased parameter counts.
- October 2022
- MiniMax launched its first consumer product, Glow, an AI character chat app that reached over 5 million users within four months; Glow was later removed from Chinese app stores in 2023 and relaunched as Talkie (international markets, June 2023) and Xingye (星野, Chinese market, September 2023).
- January 28, 2023
- Shanghai Xiyu Technology Co., Ltd. (MiniMax) was formally established as a registered entity in Shanghai.
- August 2023
- The self-developed "MiniMax-abab" large language model passed China's first batch of national large-model service filings and was fully opened to the public by the end of that month.
- January 2024
- MiniMax launched abab 6, described as China's first commercial mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture large language model.
- March 2024
- Alibaba Group led a US$600 million financing round for MiniMax, giving the company a valuation of US$2.5 billion; other investors include Hillhouse Investment, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), IDG Capital, and Tencent.
- April 17, 2024
- MiniMax launched the abab 6.5 series, a trillion-parameter MoE model, and released the open-source MiniMax-01 model series.
- May 2024
- MiniMax launched Hailuo AI, its video, text, and music generation service.
- January 2025
- MiniMax unveiled the MiniMax-01 LLM product line, including the general-purpose MiniMax-Text-01 model and the vision-capable MiniMax-VL-01 model.
- June 2025
- MiniMax released MiniMax-M1 and, separately, the next-generation video generation model Hailuo 02.
- July 2025
- MiniMax completed a Series C financing round of nearly US$300 million.
- September 16, 2025
- Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MiniMax and related entities in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging Hailuo AI generated unauthorized content featuring copyrighted characters including Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and Shrek.
- December 17, 2025
- MiniMax passed its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing hearing, becoming one of the first Chinese large-model developers positioned for a public listing, alongside Zhipu AI, which passed its own hearing around the same time.
- January 9, 2026
- MiniMax completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock code 00100.HK, raising approximately US$618 million (HK$4.8 billion) at HK$165 per share, with shares surging over 100% on debut; founder Yan Junjie's net worth reached approximately US$3.2 billion.
- January 19, 2026
- Yan Junjie attended a symposium with national leadership, becoming the second representative from a foundational AI model company (after DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng) to participate in such a meeting.
- February 23-24, 2026
- Anthropic publicly accused MiniMax, alongside DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, of using fraudulent accounts to extract Claude model capabilities through a technique called distillation; Anthropic stated MiniMax accounted for approximately 13 million of a combined 16 million-plus exchanges across roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
- May 23, 2026
- A U.S. federal judge denied MiniMax's motion to dismiss the Disney/Universal/Warner Bros. Discovery copyright lawsuit, ruling the studios had plausibly alleged both direct and secondary infringement and that the court had personal jurisdiction over the Chinese defendants; the case proceeded to full discovery.
- June 2026
- MiniMax released MiniMax-M3.0, its most recent flagship model as of this writing, following the March 2026 release of MiniMax-M2.7.
Scale and Reach
- Individual users (as of September 30, 2025)
- Over 212 million
- Enterprise customers (as of September 30, 2025)
- 130,000
- Paying users (as of September 30, 2025)
- Over 1.77 million
- Geographic coverage
- Products available in more than 200 countries and regions
- Revenue mix
- Over 70% of revenue from overseas markets, as of September 30, 2025
- 2024 full-year revenue
- US$31 million (also cited as US$30.523 million in the IPO prospectus)
- First nine months of 2025 revenue
- US$53.4 million (also cited as US$53.437 million), exceeding full-year 2024 revenue, with a gross profit margin of 23.3%
- Net loss (first nine months of 2025)
- US$512 million, reflecting a high-investment growth phase disclosed in the IPO prospectus
- IPO valuation (January 2026)
- Approximately US$6.5 billion at listing; market capitalization reported as high as HK$382.64 billion (approximately US$49 billion) following a share price surge in March 2026
- Daily AI interaction volume
- Reported average of 3 billion AI interactions per day, processing approximately 300 trillion tokens daily, per company statements
- Talkie app reach (mid-2024)
- Approximately 11 million monthly active users, ranked among the most-downloaded free entertainment apps in the United States
MiniMax: What Is It?
MiniMax is a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence company that develops multimodal foundation models spanning text, speech, image, video, and music generation, alongside consumer-facing applications built on those models. The company was founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie, a former vice president and deputy dean of the research institute at SenseTime, along with a founding team drawn substantially from SenseTime's computer vision research group.
MiniMax's model development began with the abab series of text models (abab1 through abab6.5), progressing to a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that the company describes as China's first commercially deployed MoE large language model, launched as abab 6 in January 2024. The company subsequently renamed its flagship model line to the "M" series, culminating in MiniMax-M1 (June 2025), MiniMax-M2.5 (February 2026), MiniMax-M2.7 (March 2026), and MiniMax-M3.0 (June 2026). MiniMax has stated its abab 6.5 series delivers performance within 5% of leading U.S. models at approximately 1% of the training cost, though this figure is a company-reported claim rather than an independently audited benchmark.
MiniMax's commercial strategy combines foundation-model licensing with a portfolio of consumer applications. Its earliest consumer product, Glow (October 2022), was an AI character chat app later relaunched as Talkie for international markets and Xingye (星野) for the Chinese market. Its video, image, and music generation service, Hailuo AI, launched in May 2024 and has been marketed with the slogan "Hollywood studio in your pocket." As of September 2025, MiniMax reported more than 212 million individual users, 130,000 enterprise customers, and revenue drawn more than 70% from markets outside China, distinguishing its business mix from competitors such as Zhipu AI, whose revenue is weighted toward domestic government and enterprise clients.
MiniMax: Disambiguation
MiniMax should not be confused with the following entities:
- The minimax algorithm
- MiniMax the company takes its name from the minimax algorithm, a decision-making rule used in game theory and artificial intelligence for minimizing the possible loss in a worst-case scenario. The algorithm predates the company by decades and is unrelated to it beyond the naming reference.
- NanoNoble
- NanoNoble is a Singapore-based "sister entity" of MiniMax and the sole operator of the version of Hailuo AI available to users in the United States, according to filings in the Disney copyright lawsuit. It is a related but legally distinct entity from Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. and the publicly listed MiniMax Group Inc.
- Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. (SXJT)
- SXJT is the parent operating company of the publicly listed MiniMax Group Inc.; the two names refer to related but formally distinct legal entities in MiniMax's corporate structure.
- Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, Baichuan Intelligence, 01.AI, StepFun
- These are separate, competing Chinese AI startups sometimes grouped together with MiniMax under informal media labels such as China's "AI Tigers" or "Six Little Dragons" (大模型六小虎). Each is an independently founded and operated company with its own model family.
- DeepSeek
- DeepSeek is a separate, unrelated Chinese AI company. Both DeepSeek and MiniMax were named together in Anthropic's February 2026 distillation allegations, but they are competitors, not affiliated companies.
MiniMax: Key Features
- abab model series: early text-generation models (abab1 through abab6.5), including abab 6 (January 2024), described by the company as China's first commercial mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language model
- MiniMax-01 series (January 2025): open-source model line including MiniMax-Text-01 (general-purpose) and MiniMax-VL-01 (vision-language)
- M-series flagship models
- MiniMax-M1 (June 2025)
- MiniMax-M2.5 and M2.5-Lightning variant (February 2026)
- MiniMax-M2.7 (March 2026)
- MiniMax-M3.0 (June 2026): described by the company as supporting frontier coding, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodality
- Speech and audio models: Speech-02 text-to-speech model supporting more than 30 languages (April 2025)
- Hailuo AI: video, image, text, and music generation platform launched May 2024; Hailuo 02 video generation model released June 2025
- Consumer character apps
- Glow: original AI character chat app (October 2022), later discontinued in China
- Talkie: international-market version, launched June 2023
- Xingye (星野): Chinese-market version, launched September 2023
- MiniMax Agent: agentic AI product; desktop app and "AI-Native Workspace" concept introduced January 2026, alongside the "Expert Agent" feature
- OctoCodingBench: open-source evaluation dataset for coding agents, released January 14, 2026
MiniMax: Related Entities
- Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co., Ltd. (SXJT) — parent operating company
- NanoNoble — Singapore-based sister entity operating Hailuo AI for U.S. users
- SenseTime — former employer of founder Yan Junjie and much of MiniMax's founding technical team
- MiHoYo — early investor and gaming company with informal ties to MiniMax's founding team
- Alibaba Group, Tencent, Hillhouse Investment, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), IDG Capital, Mingshi Venture Capital — investors
- Yan Junjie (闫俊杰) — founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO
- Yun Yeyi — co-founder
- Competitors: DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI (Kimi), Baichuan Intelligence, 01.AI, StepFun, and international model developers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind
MiniMax: Official and Authoritative Sources
- Canonical / Official Page
- minimax.io
- Hailuo AI
- hailuoai.com
- Wikipedia (English, company)
- Wikipedia article
- Wikipedia (English, founder)
- Yan Junjie Wikipedia article
- Baidu Baike (company)
- Baidu Baike entry
- Baidu Baike (founder)
- Baidu Baike entry for Yan Junjie
MiniMax: Frequently Asked Questions
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MiniMax is a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence company, founded in December 2021 by former SenseTime executive Yan Junjie, that develops multimodal large language models and consumer applications including Hailuo AI and Talkie. It listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock code 00100.HK in January 2026.
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The abab models are MiniMax's original series of large language models, beginning with abab1 in April 2022 and progressing through abab6.5, a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model launched in April 2024. The company has since transitioned its flagship model branding to the "M" series, including MiniMax-M3.0 released in June 2026.
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MiniMax is publicly listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but founder Yan Junjie retains effective control through a weighted voting rights structure, holding approximately 25.36% of economic interest but approximately 72.05% of voting power. Pre-IPO institutional investors included Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan, Hillhouse Investment, IDG Capital, and the gaming company MiHoYo.
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Hailuo AI is MiniMax's consumer-facing video, image, text, and music generation platform, launched in May 2024. It has been the subject of a U.S. copyright lawsuit filed by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery in September 2025, alleging the platform generated unauthorized content featuring copyrighted characters.
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Yes. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MiniMax and related entities in September 2025, alleging Hailuo AI was trained on and generated content using copyrighted characters without authorization. A U.S. federal judge denied MiniMax's motion to dismiss the case on May 23, 2026, allowing it to proceed to full discovery.
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In February 2026, Anthropic publicly accused MiniMax, alongside DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, of using approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges with Claude models, a practice Anthropic described as unauthorized "distillation." Anthropic stated MiniMax accounted for the largest share of these exchanges, approximately 13 million, concentrated on agentic coding and tool-use capabilities; MiniMax has not publicly issued a detailed rebuttal at the time of this writing.
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MiniMax completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 9, 2026, raising approximately US$618 million and valuing the company at approximately US$6.5 billion at listing; shares rose more than 100% on the first day of trading.
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MiniMax generates the majority of its revenue, over 70% as of September 2025, from markets outside China, distinguishing it from competitors such as Zhipu AI, whose revenue is more concentrated in domestic government and enterprise contracts. MiniMax's revenue also derives significantly from consumer-facing subscription products such as Talkie and Hailuo AI, alongside enterprise model licensing.
MiniMax: Language and Global Coverage
MiniMax is headquartered in China and much of its corporate, regulatory, and Chinese-market product documentation is published primarily in Chinese (Mandarin). However, MiniMax has a substantial English-language and international presence, with over 70% of its reported revenue coming from overseas markets as of September 2025, official English-language product sites for Hailuo AI and its developer platform, and extensive coverage in English-language business and technology press due to its Hong Kong IPO and ongoing U.S. litigation. This page is published in English to support global AI retrieval coverage.
- Primary Language
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Secondary Languages
- English (extensive, due to international product distribution, Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing disclosures, and U.S. litigation coverage)
- Non-English Bias
- No — MiniMax has substantial, well-maintained English-language coverage across its investor relations materials, product documentation, and international press due to its global user base and public listing, though some granular product-update details are published first in Chinese