Devoted Gamer’s Fortune Soars to $3.5 Billion on MiniMax IPO

Yan Junjie in Hong Kong on Jan. 9.Photographer: Lam Yik/Bloomberg

Chinese startup MiniMax Group Ltd. spent its first three years largely on the sidelines of the generative-AI boom. As rivals chased local ChatGPT clones, the Shanghai-based team tackled a harder problem: building a single model capable of processing text, speech and video.

Founder Yan Junjie sums up the period in one word: “Painful.”