China’s MiniMax Plans $2 Billion Raise as Founder Forgoes Salary for AGI Goal

MiniMax, one of China’s biggest AI companies, is looking to raise roughly $2.05 billion in Hong Kong just as founder and CEO Yan Junjie pledged to stop taking a salary until the company reaches artificial general intelligence.

In a memo to staff shared publicly on X by a MiniMax executive, Yan wrote that from that day on he would no longer draw a salary, adding that over the next four years he would allocate shares equal to 4% of the company’s total equity, held personally, to reward employees. A further 1% would go toward a fund supporting open-source AI development. ‘This is the long-term commitment I make as the founder,’ he wrote. ‘We will keep going until we get there.’

The fundraising involves a Hong Kong share placement of 35.6 million new Class A shares priced at HK$268 apiece, expected to raise about HK$9.54 billion, alongside HK$6.5 billion in zero-coupon convertible bonds maturing in 2027 with a HK$335 conversion price. Combined, the raise totals approximately HK$16.04 billion, earmarked for AI infrastructure, research, commercialisation and general corporate operations.

MiniMax went public in Hong Kong in January, raising about HK$4.8 billion at a roughly $6.5 billion valuation. It faces stiff competition from Chinese rivals DeepSeek, Zhipu and Moonshot AI, and launched its newest flagship model, MiniMax M3, in June, featuring a one-million-token context window and the company’s MiniMax Sparse Attention architecture aimed at cutting long-context inference costs.

MiniMax reported $79 million in revenue for 2025, up 159% year-over-year, with more than 70% generated outside China, alongside a $1.87 billion net loss driven largely by fair-value changes in financial instruments tied to its IPO.