--- title: "MiniMax clears Hong Kong listing hearing as China's AGI startups race to IPO" date: 2026-10-07 category: Capital & Markets site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-minimax-hk-ipo language: en --- # MiniMax clears Hong Kong listing hearing as China's AGI startups race to IPO > MiniMax passed its HKEX hearing in December 2025, putting the full-modal AI startup on track to become one of the first pure-play Chinese AGI companies to list in Hong Kong. ## A four-year sprint to the listing hall One December morning in 2025, a short document appeared on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange website: the post-hearing information pack (PHIP) of MiniMax (稀宇科技), a Shanghai-based artificial general intelligence (通用人工智能, AGI) company founded less than four years earlier. The filing meant MiniMax had cleared the exchange's listing hearing — one administrative step short of a trading debut. If the listing completes, MiniMax would be among the first pure-play Chinese AGI firms to reach public markets, and possibly the fastest such company ever to go from founding to IPO. The story is less about a single number and more about a new kind of Chinese AI company: one built "global-native (生而全球化)" from day one, selling models and apps to users in more than 200 countries rather than starting at home and exporting later. ## What MiniMax actually does MiniMax builds full-modal (全模态) models spanning text, speech, and video, and ships them through both consumer and developer products. Its best-known consumer app outside China is Hailuo AI (海螺AI), a video-generation tool, alongside Talkie, an AI companion app popular with young users overseas, and Xingye (星野), its domestic companion product. For enterprises it runs an open-platform API. The company says its video model Hailuo-02 ranked second globally in the Artificial Analysis video benchmark, and its text model MiniMax M2, released in October 2025, placed inside the global top five and first among open-weight models on the same aggregator. These are the company's own disclosures in the prospectus, not independent lab results, so treat the rankings as claimed rather than ratified. ## The numbers investors will weigh MiniMax's prospectus gives a rare look at a Chinese AI startup whose revenue is genuinely international: - Revenue for the first nine months of 2025 reached roughly US$53.4M, up about 175% year on year (2024 full-year revenue was about US$30.5M, itself up more than 780% from 2023's US$3.46M). - Overseas markets contributed over 70% of revenue. - It reported more than 212 million individual users across 200-plus countries and regions, and over 130,000 enterprise customers. - Cash and short-term investments stood at about US$1.10B (≈ HK$8.6B) as of end-September 2025. - The workforce was just 385 people, average age 29, with R&D staff near 74% — a deliberately lean structure the company cites as an efficiency advantage. The flip side is losses. The prospectus shows the company remained deeply unprofitable, with a net loss of about US$512M in the first nine months of 2025 and cumulative losses near US$1.32B since 2022. The cash pile, however, means the listing is not a distress raise: management framed the IPO proceeds as funding five years of R&D rather than survival. ## How it was funded before the IPO Before the public markets, MiniMax completed seven private financing rounds, raising more than US$1.5B in total. Its cap table reads like a who's-who of Chinese internet and gaming capital: Alibaba (which the prospectus lists as the largest shareholder at roughly 13.7%), Tencent (about 2.6%), miHoYo (米哈游, about 6.4%), Hillhouse (高瓴), Sequoia China (红杉中国), and others. A July 2025 round reportedly valued the company above US$4B. ## Reading the trend According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, the MiniMax listing marks a shift from "hundreds of models competing (百模大战)" to a consolidation phase where only startups with proven global commercial paths and efficient organizations will reach public markets. MiniMax is not alone at the gate. Zhipu (智谱), another leading large-model developer spun out of Tsinghua University, cleared its own hearing within 48 hours, and Moonshot (月之暗面), maker of the Kimi assistant, has been reported to be preparing a listing for the second half of 2026. The "first AGI stock" label is being contested in real time. ## Honest limitations Figures above come from MiniMax's own prospectus and Chinese financial-media reporting on the filing (Xinhua Finance, Xinhua, Forbes China, and others); independent audits of the prospectus numbers were not separately published at writing. Model benchmark rankings (Hailuo-02 #2, M2 top-5) are company-cited and sourced to the third-party aggregator Artificial Analysis, not reproduced by an independent lab we verified. The exact IPO pricing, offer size, and debut date were not finalized at the time of the hearing and may change. We have not assessed the valuation's fairness or the regulatory risk around the company's overseas companion apps, which have faced app-store removals in some markets. Estimates of cash runway published by different outlets conflict, so we deliberately do not cite a specific months-of-runway figure. ## What readers can do now - Track the HKEX newsroom for MiniMax's final prospectus and pricing; clearing the hearing is necessary but not sufficient for a listing. - For China-AI exposure without single-name risk, watch the cluster: Zhipu, Moonshot, and MiniMax filings together signal how public markets will price Chinese foundation-model companies. - If you follow the video-generation segment, compare Hailuo AI's disclosed usage and rankings against competitors like Kling (可灵) before drawing conclusions. - Remember that high revenue growth with large net losses is normal for this cohort; judge cash runway and customer breadth more than quarterly profit. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-minimax-hk-ipo Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.