Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup MiniMax has passed the Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing hearing, according to a stock exchange filing on Sunday (Dec 21), a person familiar with the matter earlier told Reuters, with the company aiming to raise up to HK$5 billion (S$829.6 million) in the flotation.
MiniMax secretly filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong earlier this year, which could happen by the end of 2025, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters in July.
One source said MiniMax could raise between HK$4 billion and HK$5 billion in the IPO, giving the company an overall valuation of US$4 billion.
China International Capital and UBS were hired to sponsor the IPO, disclosures showed, but did not provide details on the size of the offering.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are acting as general coordinators along with the two sponsors, they said in a disclosure on Sunday.
After this approval, the company can proceed to launch an IPO.
“MiniMax is a global AI-based model company. Founded by a group of forward-thinking engineers, we are committed to advancing AI innovation to perform the full range of human intellectual tasks, from learning and inference to knowledge planning and generalization,” the company said in a statement.
MiniMax is among the first group of Chinese AI companies aiming to go public. This year, the rise of DeepSeek, China's answer to ChatGPT, has increased investor interest in domestic AI products and the field.
Rival Zhipu AI also launched plans for a domestic IPO in April with CICC as its sponsor, Reuters reported at the time, citing regulatory filings.
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Founded in early 2022 by former SenseTime executive Yan Junjie, MiniMax has emerged as one of China's prominent AI companies amid the generative AI boom.
The company develops multimodal AI models such as MiniMax M1, Hailuo-02, Speech-02, and Music-01 that can process text, audio, images, video, and music.
The company said in a document that the number of monthly active users of its products increased more than six times, from 3.1 million in 2023 to 19.1 million in 2024 and 27.6 million in the nine months to the end of September 2025.
According to the company, as of September 2025, the cumulative number of users of its AI-native products has reached 200 million individual users and more than 100,000 businesses and developers in more than 200 countries and regions.
“The number of paid users of our AI-native products increased from approximately 119,700 in 2023 to approximately 650,300 in 2024 and further increased to approximately 1,771,600 for the nine months ended September 30, 2025,” the document added.
The company added that its research and development team of approximately 300 members includes experts who have worked at global AI leaders such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek. Reuters
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