Chinese artificial intelligence startup MiniMax is reportedly prepping for its initial public offering in Hong Kong, backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
A report from Bloomberg revealed the company is seeking more than $600 million, according to unnamed sources. The company will be taking investor bids as early as Wednesday, with an expected listing in January.
The deal would position MiniMax in the thick of the contentious race among Chinese generative AI firms looking to make their public debut. Additional backers include DG Capital, Perseverance Asset Management and South Korea’s Mirae Asset Group.
MiniMax is among a growing field of Chinese AI model providers aiming to become product leaders. Over the past few years, multiple model developers, including Baidu Inc. and Alibaba, have released frontier-model candidates. A senior Tencent Holdings Ltd. executive described the flurry of new models as a “war of hundred models.”
The company has managed to stand out amid a continuous rush of model releases and a crowded domestic market, as established giants and startups alike race to eke out the next performance advantage or introduce a novel large language model architecture.
Questions remain about the market’s financial stability and long-term capacity. Last year, MiniMax earned $30.5 million in revenue, compared to the colossal $13 billion in revenue projected for OpenAI Group PBC in 2025.
In spite of these concerns, investors still continue to pour substantial funds into AI startups. MiniMax raised nearly $300 million in a July funding round, following a $600 million round led by Alibaba reported in March 2024. In the United States, SoftBank Group Corp. completed a $40 billion funding commitment for OpenAI.
Last week, the company debuted M2.1, a multi-language AI model featuring significantly enhanced performance for real-world complex tasks and agentic capabilities across numerous programming languages and back office work. MiniMax is well-known for developing cutting-edge multimodal AI models capable of generating text, realistic images and video, voice generation and performing image understanding.
MiniMax is currently in contention with rival Zhipu AI, officially known as Knowledge Atlas Technology, to become the first to launch its IPO. Zhipu offered a share sale today to raise $560 million for a planned IPO debut of Jan. 8.
Image: Pixabay
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