MiniMax Group
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| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| SEHK: 100 | |
| Industry | Information technology |
| Founded | December 2021 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | Shanghai, China |
Key people |
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| Products |
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Number of employees | 200+ (2025) |
| Website | minimax.io |
MiniMax Group Inc. (Chinese: 稀宇科技; pinyin: Xīyǔ Kējì ) is an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Shanghai, China. It develops multimodal AI models and consumer applications, including the AI character apps Talkie and Xingye and the video-generation service Hailuo AI. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026.
History
[edit]MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by several computer vision researchers from SenseTime. When it first started out, it received funding from MiHoYo.[1][2][3][4]
In March 2024, Alibaba Group led a $600 million financing round for MiniMax giving it a valuation of $2.5 billion. Other investors of MiniMax include Hillhouse Investment, HongShan, IDG Capital and Tencent.[1][5]
On 9 January 2026, MiniMax held its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company.[6]
Products
[edit]Talkie
[edit]MiniMax's first product was Glow which was launched in October 2022. The app allowed users to create virtual characters and then chat with them about various topics. Only four months after launch, the app had over 5 million users.[citation needed] Glow was later removed from Chinese app stores in 2023.[7]
Glow was relaunched under two new brands: Talkie, launched for international markets in June 2023, and Xing Ye (星野), introduced in September 2023 for the Chinese market.[4][5]
In July 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Talkie ranked among the most-downloaded free entertainment apps in the U.S. and had about 11 million monthly active users.[8] Talkie produced AI-simulated conversations with people such as Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk and LeBron James.[8]
Hailuo AI
[edit]A hoodie man walking forward in the rainy cyberpunk street, carrying an umbrellaIn March 2024, MiniMax launched Hailuo AI, an AI text and music-generating large language model (LLM) platform.[2][4]
In September 2024, MiniMax launched video-01, a text-to-video model under Hailuo AI.[2]
In December 2024, Broadcast reported that Hailuo AI can reproduce the logos of British television channels Channel 4, Channel 5, and ITV in its AI-generated videos.[9]
On 20 January 2025, MiniMax launched audio functions for Hailuo AI.[10]
Other AI products
[edit]On 17 April 2024, MiniMax launched the ABAB 6.5 series, a mixture of experts language model.[4]
In January 2025, MiniMax unveiled the MiniMax-01 LLM product line, which includes a general-purpose MiniMax-Text-01 model and MiniMax-VL-01 model with visual capabilities.[11]
In April 2025, MiniMax released Speech-02, a text-to-speech model with support for over 30 languages.[12][unreliable source?]
In June 2025, MiniMax released MiniMax-M1.[13][non-primary source needed] In February 2026, MiniMax released MiniMax-M2.5, and the M2.5-Lightning variant.[14][non-primary source needed]
Legal issues
[edit]In September 2025, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery filed a copyright lawsuit in the United States alleging that Hailuo AI infringed their copyrighted characters and related works.[15]
In February 2026, Anthropic accused MiniMax and two other Chinese AI companies of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million interactions with Claude in order to improve their own large language models via "distillation."[16]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b Zhang, Jane (5 March 2024). "Alibaba Backs $2.5 Billion AI Firm in Second Big 2024 Deal". Bloomberg. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ a b c Shen, Xinmei (2 September 2024). "Chinese AI 'tiger' MiniMax launches text-to-video-generating model to rival OpenAI's Sora". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ Liu, Roxanne (1 June 2023). "China AI startup MiniMax raising over $250 million from Tencent-backed entity, others". Reuters. Archived from the original on 28 September 2023. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ a b c d "MiniMax：中国AI伴侣巨头，全球市场的新势力". finance.sina.com.cn. 30 July 2024. Archived from the original on 8 September 2024. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ a b Dotson, Kyt (5 March 2024). "Report: Chinese AI startup MiniMax raises $600M at $2.5B valuation led by Alibaba". SiliconANGLE. Archived from the original on 8 September 2024. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ Chuang, Aileen (9 January 2026). "Chinese AI start-up MiniMax shines on Hong Kong IPO debut". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 9 January 2026.
- ^ Berman, Noah (20 July 2025). "MiniMax's Moment". The Wire China. Retrieved 24 February 2026.
One of the company's first products was an app called Glow, released in October 2022, which let users in China chat with virtual characters. Chinese regulators excised it from app stores the following March; industry players speculated the removal was due to the proliferation of sexually explicit material on the platform. An official reason has never been given.
- ^ a b Huang, Raffaele (27 July 2024). "One of America's Hottest Entertainment Apps Is Chinese-Owned". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 3 October 2024. Retrieved 27 October 2024.
- ^ Miller, Max (16 December 2024). "Exclusive: Major UK broadcasters investigate AI video generator". Broadcast. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
- ^ Zheng, Xutong (22 January 2025). "Chinese AI Firms Debut New LLMs to Rival OpenAI's Powerful O1 in Math and Coding". Yicai Global. Retrieved 26 January 2025.
- ^ Jiang, Ben (16 January 2025). "Chinese AI start-up MiniMax intensifies competition with new open-source models". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 21 January 2025.
- ^ "MiniMax Audio Launches Speech-02 Voice Model: Supports 200,000 Characters at Once". AIBase.com. 2 April 2025. Retrieved 2 April 2025.
- ^ "MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention" (PDF). GitHub. 19 June 2025. Retrieved 19 June 2025.
- ^ "MiniMax M2.5: Built for Real-World Productivity". minimax.io. MiniMax. 12 February 2026. Retrieved 15 February 2026.
- ^ Varghese, Harshita Mary; Chmielewski, Dawn (16 September 2025). "Disney, Universal, Warner Bros Discovery sue China's MiniMax for copyright infringement". Reuters. Retrieved 24 February 2026.
- ^ Metz, Cade (23 February 2026). "Anthropic Accuses 3 Chinese Companies of Harvesting Its Data". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 24 February 2026.
