Inside MiniMax: Testing if AGI is Possible Without Infinite VC Money

“Gentle,” “Buddhist,” “low-key” – these are the words frequently used to describe Yan Junjie, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of MiniMax.

Yet on January 9, 2026, this seemingly most “Buddhist” founder orchestrated one of the fiercest AI IPOs in history. MiniMax shares soared 109% on their Hong Kong Stock Exchange debut, closing at HKD 345 (~$45) per share and delivering a market capitalization exceeding HK$100 billion (~$12.8 billion). It was the only Hong Kong tech IPO in the past four years to more than double on opening day, with 420,000 subscribers generating an oversubscription rate of 1,838 times. Another interesting detail is that MiniMax is China’s second “AI tiger” to go public – just one day after Zhipu AI.

Welcome yo our GenAI Unicorn series! We’ve covered other three AI Tigers before (Zhipu, Moonshot, Baichuan). Now it’s time for MiniMax. There are many striking details about this company. The decision to bet on multimodality from day one – back in 2021, long before it was fashionable. The late but decisive turn toward open source. The explicit rejection of the “genius founder” myth. An organization where researchers and engineers sit side by side, working simultaneously on foundation models and real products. And, perhaps most surprisingly, MiniMax appears to have solved what most AI startups treat as an impossible triangle: frontier-level performance, radically lower costs, and genuine mass adoption.

At first glance, the IPO looks like proof of success. But is it?

In China’s AI market, an IPO is not an endpoint. It is a way to buy oxygen. Companies go public early, often while still burning money, and are judged in real time rather than in the comfort of long private runways.

This is what makes MiniMax worth examining now. Their story – a high-stake experiment – just begins. How did they get here? Will they survive? Let’s discuss.

In today’s episode:

• How this AI Tiger Was Born: From SenseTime to Shanghai Startup

• Mission: Intelligence with Everyone

• Products and Models – what MiniMax actually does

• Let’s be open

• How does MiniMax make money?

• Financial situation

• The Competitive Landscape with Four AI Tigers

• What Makes MiniMax Different: Strategic Insights

• Challenges and Risks: The Road Ahead

• China and the US: the future of AI

• Final Thoughts

• Resources used to write this article and further reading

How this AI Tiger Was Born: From SenseTime to Shanghai Startup

In December 2021, Shanghai’s tech scene was buzzing with anticipation for SenseTime’s imminent Hong Kong IPO – but a small group of its computer vision veterans were already plotting their exit. Veterans who were barely in their early thirties.

Yan Junjie had spent more than six years at SenseTime, rising to become one of its youngest vice presidents. He had seen the company at its strongest, scaling computer vision into real businesses, real contracts, real revenue. He had also seen its limits. Vision models were becoming projects, then products, then maintenance work. General intelligence was not part of the plan.

The conviction that another path was possible had been forming much earlier. In 2014, during a summer internship at Baidu, Yan worked on large-scale speech recognition and encountered GPU clusters for the first time. What stood out was not architectural cleverness, but regularity. As data and compute increased, performance improved in smooth, predictable ways. Dario Amodei – who would later co-found Anthropic – was at Baidu around the same time, working on similar problems. The pattern was visible to anyone paying attention: throw more GPUs and more training data at the problem, and accuracy went up in a smooth, almost boring curve.

"Scaling Law was discovered around 2014 when we were doing speech recognition," Yan would recall years later in his interview with Luo Yonghao. "It happened at a Chinese company. But then... nothing. We didn't capitalize on it.”

That regret would haunt him. China had seen the future first – and let it slip away.

The second revelation came in 2019, when Yan – a gamer himself, even known by his colleagues by his Dota nickname IO – was entranced by how OpenAI’s Dota 2 system defeated the world’s best professional teams. This was no longer narrow optimization. It was coordination, adaptation, and strategy under uncertainty. If reinforcement learning could scale there, Yan began to wonder where else it could scale.

And then OpenAI published “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” introducing GPT-3. That paper blew Yan’s mind. There were so many things possible with foundation models. Inside China’s AI circles, though, the idea was met with disbelief. Multimodal AGI – what the heck was that?

MiniMax registered in Shanghai in December 2021 with a small founding team drawn from the same ecosystem around SenseTime. Yan Junjie as CEO. Yun Yeyi, then director of innovative business at SenseTime, brought operational discipline and an outward-looking, global orientation shaped by four years in the US (she attended Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities). A few articles list Yang Bin and Zhou Yucong as co-founders, but we couldn’t confirm that they are still involved in the company’s business. The MiniMax’s website lists Yan Junjie as the only founder. Yun Yeyi’s Linkedin shows her as a co-founder.

In any case, what united the team was a shared conviction. Intelligence could be treated as an engineering problem, broken down, optimized, and built under constraint.

The experiment had begun. And it needed money.

The Genshin Impact Gamble

Having a vision and getting funded are different games. The team’s first pitch meetings were brutal. Yan Junjie later recalled this period in one word: “painful.” In early investor meetings, their ambitious claims about building consumer AI products from scratch and working toward AGI met skepticism, sometimes outright dismissal. No one could imagine how powerful AI would become. Some investors in big tech circles would simply call him a fraud.

But a gamer sees another gamer. MiHoYo, the gaming studio behind Genshin Impact, co-founded by billionaire Cai Haoyu, decided to bet on Yan’s vision. In 2022, they recognized that the next generation of gaming experiences would be AI-native, with dynamic NPCs and procedurally generated content requiring exactly the multimodal models MiniMax proposed to build.

With gaming industry credibility in hand, the MiniMax team secured their first formal round: approximately $30 million in early 2022 from Yunqi Capital, where Chen Yu (now managing partner) became their first institutional believer. The bet was counterintuitive: while most Chinese AI startups chased B2B enterprise contracts, MiniMax declared from day one they were "B2C first."

That was bold.

Mission: Intelligence with Everyone

AGI Through Consumer Products