 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| SEHK: 100 | |
| Industry | Information technology |
| Founded | December 2021; 4 years ago (2021-12) |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | Shanghai,China |
Key people |
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| Products |
|
Number of employees | 200+ (2025) |
| Website | minimax.io |
MiniMax is anartificial intelligence (AI) company based inShanghai, China.
MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by severalcomputer vision researchers fromSenseTime. When it first started out, it received funding fromMiHoYo.[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 includeHillhouse Investment,HongShan,IDG Capital andTencent.[1][5]
On 9 January 2026, MiniMax held itsinitial public offering on theHong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company.[6]
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. Due to filing issues,[clarification needed] Glow was terminated in March 2023.[3][4]
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]
Talkie was profiledThe Wall Street Journal in July 2024. For June 2024 Talkie ranked fifth among the most-downloaded free entertainment apps in the U.S. More than half of Talkie's 11 million monthly active users were in the U.S. Other popular markets included Philippines, the U.K. and Canada. Talkie produced AI-simulated conversations with people such asDonald Trump,Taylor Swift,Elon Musk andLeBron James.[7]
A hoodie man walking forward in the rainy cyberpunk street, carrying an umbrellaIn March 2024, MiniMax launched Hailuo AI, an AI text and music-generatinglarge language model (LLM) platform.[2][4]
In September 2024, MiniMax launched video-01, atext-to-video model under Hailuo AI.[2] A review by Tom's Guide described it as roughly equivalent to Luma LabsDream Machine but not as good asRunway Gen-3.[8]
In December 2024,Broadcast reported that Hailuo AI can reproduce the logos of British television channelsChannel 4,Channel 5, andITV in its AI-generated videos.[9]
On 20 January 2025, MiniMax launched audio functions forHailuo AI.[10]
On 17 April 2024, MiniMax launched the ABAB 6.5 series, amixture 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, atext-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]
