According to Bloomberg Business, Chinese AI startup MiniMax Group Ltd. debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Friday, with shares soaring 45% in early trading. The IPO priced at the top of its range, valuing the four-year-old company at $6.5 billion. The listing crystallized a massive fortune for its 36-year-old founder, Yan Junjie, now worth an estimated $2.4 billion. His company, which spent its first three years building a single multi-modal model for text, speech, and video, has served at least 212 million users. Its flagship video generator, Hailuo, launched in October 2025 and is a key revenue driver, though the firm posted an adjusted loss of about $186 million in the first nine months of last year due to massive computing costs.
The Gamer DNA Behind The AI
Here’s the thing about Yan Junjie: his path to a multi-billion dollar AI empire wasn’t exactly linear. He was a doctoral student aiming for a modest Java developer job. He worked at SenseTime for six years. But the real catalyst seems to have been a deep obsession with the game Dota 2. Tracking OpenAI after its bots beat human pros in 2019 lit the fuse. That gamer identity is baked into MiniMax—Yan’s alias is “IO,” a Dota hero reference. It even helped him bond with key investor Cai Haoyu, the billionaire co-founder of Genshin Impact studio MiHoYo. So you’ve got this fascinating blend: hardcore research from the SenseTime days meets a gamer’s instinct for what’s cool and technically pushing boundaries. It’s a unique founder profile that clearly resonated with a who’s-who of investors, from Alibaba and Tencent to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
Hailuo, The Video Ace Up Its Sleeve
While everyone was rushing to make a ChatGPT clone, MiniMax’s “painful” multi-modal bet created a differentiator: Hailuo. This is the product that gets creators excited and is often reviewed as one of the few Chinese models that can genuinely hang with Runway and OpenAI’s Sora. Turning text into six-second cinematic clips is a killer app for a massive content-hungry market. It’s their second-biggest money-maker after the Talkie chat app. But that success comes at a staggering cost. The “Mixture of Experts” (MoE) models they train are compute monsters, directly leading to those huge losses. They’re betting that owning the full stack—from the foundational model up to the consumer app—is worth the burn. It’s a high-stakes, capital-intensive game. You can see why they needed that elite investor cash to even play.
The $6 Billion Dollar Question
So the IPO is a smash hit. The founder is a new billionaire. But now what? The analyst quoted by Bloomberg, Edison Lee from Jefferies, nails the core anxiety. He says it’s “hard to justify the valuation” since revenue needs to grow “many times” to make the math work. The revenue did grow 175% year-on-year, which is insane, but it’s growing from a smaller base. The biggest risk he points out is external: the entire valuation hinges on the US AI trade holding up in 2026. If hype deflates there, it pulls the rug out from under Chinese AI stocks too. MiniMax also admitted it missed internal monetization targets in 2024. So you have this incredible technical achievement and product momentum, but it’s running on a treadmill of massive computing costs in a fiercely competitive and politically complex arena. Can they monetize 212 million users fast enough? That’s the multi-billion dollar bet investors just made.
An Uneven Path Ahead
Yan called the first three years “pure agony.” I think the next few might be defined by pure pressure. The company is now public, with all the quarterly scrutiny that brings. Investors will want to see a clear path to profitability, not just cool tech. The operating environment remains complex, balancing global ambition with geopolitical realities. And while Hailuo is a technical showpiece that stands out in reviews of video generators, the competition isn’t sleeping. Basically, MiniMax has proven it can build something world-class. The new chapter is about proving it can build a sustainable, world-class *business*. For a company born from a gamer’s obsession, the hardest level might just be starting.
