MiniMax has a market cap of 300 billion, and a new star has emerged this year.

Still boiling.

Yesterday (February 20), the first trading day of the Year of the Horse in Hong Kong stocks, Zhipu and MiniMax surged again. Among them, MiniMax closed up 14.52%, with market capitalization breaking through 300 billion HKD. In just two months since its listing, MiniMax’s stock price has increased by over 450%.

Starting in Shanghai, the person behind MiniMax is a PhD born in 1989, Yan Junjie. He previously worked at SenseTime Technology and later ventured into AGI startups in 2022. His rapid growth has been remarkable; MiniMax achieved an IPO in just four years. Yan Junjie has also become an iconic figure of China’s new AI wave.

In just a few days, we have witnessed both Zhipu and MiniMax surpassing 300 billion in market cap. In this grand scene, the era of AI is unfolding magnificently.

At 37, he created 300 billion

Yan Junjie is undoubtedly the soul of MiniMax.

Born in 1989 in a small county in Henan, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Southeast University, then pursued a PhD at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and continued postdoctoral research in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University.

During his PhD, Yan Junjie joined SenseTime, starting as an intern and eventually serving as Vice President of SenseTime Group, Deputy Director of the Research Institute, and CTO of the Smart City Business Group. By the end of 2021, he left this position, initially preparing to become a teacher.

But one event changed his mind. Yan Junjie recalled this during MiniMax OpenDay: one day, an external party told him they wanted to write a memoir but couldn’t do it because it required excellent language organization skills, and his grandfather couldn’t type. “At that time, I thought only artificial intelligence could help him accomplish this.”

Thus, in early 2022, Yan Junjie officially founded MiniMax in Shanghai, writing down his original intention and path in a room of less than 100 square meters, with the mission of “co-creating intelligence with everyone,” aiming to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As a result, MiniMax became one of only two domestic companies actively developing large models before the release of ChatGPT.

Soon, MiniMax’s first AI product was launched, followed by the release of Xingye/Talkie, Hailuo AI, and other C-end products covering content creation, intelligent assistants, and entertainment applications. In the second half of 2023, while most domestic large model companies continued iterating dense models, MiniMax unexpectedly invested heavily in MoE architecture. Subsequently, MiniMax launched the abab 6 model in January 2024, becoming the first domestic MoE large model. It then released the abab 6.5 series, pioneering large-scale commercial deployment using MoE architecture.

What is less known is that MiniMax experienced two failures during R&D before succeeding on the third attempt. Only then did Yan Junjie tell investors that MoE was nearly under control. Early investor Ming Shi Venture Capital’s Huang Mingming later sighed to Yan Junjie: “You couldn’t bet on it; maybe this company would have failed.”

In January this year, MiniMax reached a milestone by officially listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with an IPO issue price of HKD 165 per share, closing up 109%, and surpassing HKD 100 billion in market cap on the first day.

As Yan Junjie stated at the listing ceremony, the true value of an AI company is to provide a continuous stream of advanced intelligence for people to use. He and MiniMax are embarking on a new journey.

A super return

10 millionaires from 300 employees

Unexpectedly, MiniMax has entered a rapid rise.

After a 109% surge on the first day of trading, MiniMax’s stock price continued to climb, first surpassing a market cap of HKD 1500 billion at the end of January, then breaking HKD 2000 billion on February 13. At the end of the Year of the Snake, the stock price was HKD 847 per share, with a total market cap exceeding HKD 2600 billion.

What’s astonishing is that on the first trading day of the Year of the Horse in Hong Kong stocks, MiniMax’s stock price continued to soar, closing up 14.52%, with market cap officially surpassing HKD 300 billion. Since early 2026, MiniMax’s stock price has increased by over 450%.

So, how did MiniMax achieve a tripling of its market value?

It all started just before the Spring Festival, when MiniMax officially released its flagship programming model M2.5, positioned as the world’s first production-level model designed natively for agent scenarios, supporting full-stack programming development across PC, app, and cross-platform applications. According to the official technical report, M2.5, operating at 100 tokens per second, costs only $1 per hour of continuous operation.

Such a surge naturally brought substantial returns to its investors.

Back in early 2022, around the same time, MiHoYo, Hillhouse, IDG Capital, and Yunqi Capital became angel investors in MiniMax, with a post-investment valuation of $200 million. Among them, MiHoYo held about 5.24% of MiniMax after listing, with a paper value exceeding HKD 15 billion.

The prospectus shows that MiniMax’s investors include MiHoYo, Hillhouse, IDG Capital, Yunqi Capital, Ming Shi Venture Capital, Sequoia China, Alibaba, Tencent, Shanghai Guotou, Cornerstone Capital, Xiaohongshu, Guofang Innovation, Matrix Partners, and others, forming a large team.

Notably, MiniMax is considered the youngest AI team.

The prospectus indicates that in 2025, CEO Yan Junjie will be 36, COO Yuan Yeyi 31, Large Language Model Lead Zhao Pengyu 29, and Visual Model Lead Zhou Yuchong 32. The company has 385 full-time employees, with an average age of about 29, over 70% of whom are R&D personnel.

Meanwhile, including former employees, MiniMax’s employee stock ownership plan involves 392 people, meaning nearly all staff hold shares. Among them, 363 ordinary employees hold a total of about 3.41% of the issued shares after IPO, with an average shareholding value of HKD 28 million per person.

Yan Junjie previously remarked, “In the past four years, we started from zero, built a globally leading multimodal capability with a group of young people, and served over 200 million users worldwide. But all this is just the beginning. We look forward to the rapid progress of the AI industry in the next four years, just like the past four.”

This young AI force from China is sweeping the world.

The rising tide

China’s new tech giants erupt

This is no coincidence.

Recall June 2025, Ying Shi Innovation listed on the A-share market, with a first-day market cap exceeding 70 billion yuan, making founder Liu Jingkang the first post-90s to ring the bell on the STAR Market. After listing, the company’s stock price soared, with a market cap exceeding 140 billion yuan.

Thus, Liu Jingkang became a rising star of the year. At 34, he and his wife Pan Yao ranked on the 2025 Hurun Rich List with assets of 38.5 billion yuan.

Such stories are becoming increasingly common.

This spring, Yu Shu Technology, which also went viral on the Spring Festival Gala, is led by a post-90s founder. Wang Xingxing, a graduate of Zhejiang University of Technology and Shanghai University, has been good at inventing small gadgets since childhood. At 19, he built his first robot. When he received his first investment, he was only 26. His company, Yu Shu Technology, is now rushing toward an IPO.

Similarly, Zhiyuan Robotics, last year, acquired the listed company Shangwei New Materials, which then experienced ten consecutive trading halts, becoming the first 10-bagger of 2025.

Everyone knows that behind Zhiyuan Robotics stands another post-90s, Bilibili UP host Zhihui Jun Peng Zhihui, with 2.7 million followers. He graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology and was selected for Huawei’s “Genius Youth Program.” By the end of 2022, he announced leaving Huawei to pursue his dreams and passion, venturing into robotics entrepreneurship.

Similar in spirit is Yang Zhilin from Moon of Darkness. Recently, The Paper disclosed that Moon of Darkness is about to complete a new round of over $700 million in financing, with its valuation rapidly doubling and surpassing $10 billion. Behind this rapid rise is a post-90s from Tsinghua, Yang Zhilin.

Looking around, many such faces exist: Wang He from Galaxy General, Zeng Guoyang from Mianbi Intelligence, Hu Yuanming from Meshy, Zhang Junbin from Yunwing… seemingly students, yet they have built astonishing companies through knowledge and technology.

Through these scenes, we see the new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. As IDG Capital team observed: since ChatGPT’s emergence, truly groundbreaking innovations often come from young teams. “They may lack industry experience, but because they are unbound by traditional thinking, they can quickly establish technological advantages in frontier fields like AI.”

If the previous wave of Chinese entrepreneurs excelled at running businesses and sales, then this new generation of young founders is more focused on technology. It is these young bloods continuously injecting into China’s tech history, surging forward endlessly.