Quick Facts
- MiniMax is raising $2 billion through a share sale and zero-coupon convertible bonds, arranged by Morgan Stanley and UBS, with 7x oversubscription from more than 20 sovereign and institutional investors.
- The company’s enterprise and developer customer base grew from roughly 200,000 at the end of 2025 to more than 1 million by the end of June 2026, while its consumer products reached about 300 million global users.
- CEO Yan Junjie pledged to forgo his salary until the company achieves artificial general intelligence and committed 5% of his personal equity to employee rewards and open-source development.
Shanghai-based AI developer MiniMax Group Inc. is raising $2 billion in fresh capital, citing a fivefold increase in enterprise and developer customers since the start of the year. The deal attracted more than 20 international sovereign funds and long-term institutional investors and was oversubscribed seven times.
The raise is structured in two parts. MiniMax is seeking HK$9.5 billion, roughly $1.2 billion, through the sale of 35.6 million new shares priced at HK$268 each. That represents a 9.9% discount to its prior closing price of HK$297.4 in Hong Kong. The company will follow with HK$6.5 billion in zero-coupon convertible bonds due 2027, with a conversion price set 12.6% above Thursday’s close.
MiniMax said it will direct 80% of the proceeds toward AI infrastructure and model research and development, including deploying next-generation AI accelerators and high-bandwidth networks. About 10% will fund global commercialization of its AI agent products, and the remaining 10% will cover working capital and general corporate purposes.
The capital raise comes days after a turbulent stretch for the company’s stock. When MiniMax’s first lock-up period since its January listing expired on July 9, 153 million shares representing 48.9% of total equity became tradable. Some financial investors sold, sending the stock down nearly 30% over two days. The company’s market cap fell from a peak of roughly HK$410 billion to about HK$81.8 billion at the lows. Shares dropped another 9.8% on the day the fundraise was announced.
Core shareholders Alibaba and miHoYo said they would not sell their stakes. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citi each issued buy ratings, with Goldman calling the valuation attractive and the company’s model cost-efficient.
The funding news arrived alongside a public statement from CEO Yan Junjie, 36, a former vice president at SenseTime who co-founded MiniMax in December 2021. In an internal memo, Yan said he would stop taking a salary effective immediately and would not resume compensation until MiniMax achieves AGI. He also committed shares equal to 4% of total company equity from his personal holdings to reward employees who make long-term contributions, and pledged another 1% to an open-source community development fund.
On the product side, MiniMax released its MiniMax-M3 model in June. The model carries 427 billion parameters and supports context windows of up to 1 million tokens. The company says M3 processes prompts nine times faster during prefill and 15 times faster during decoding than its previous flagship, a gain it attributes to a proprietary technique called MiniMax Sparse Attention. In the SWE-Bench Pro and Terminal-Bench 2.1 benchmarks, M3 scored above GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
MiniMax is already working on a follow-up called M3 Pro, which the company expects to carry between 2.5 trillion and 2.7 trillion parameters. The model is planned for release and open-sourcing in the third quarter of 2026.
For enterprise software buyers and SaaS founders watching the competitive AI model market, MiniMax’s customer growth trajectory and open-source commitments signal a Chinese developer positioning itself aggressively against Western incumbents. Its consumer products already reach about 300 million global users through its Talkie and Hailuo AI platforms.
Read more: Open-source AI model developer MiniMax raises $2B in funding