MiniMax raises $2 billion as CEO forgoes salary until AGI amid 80% stock slump

MiniMax raises $2bn as its CEO forgoes pay until AGI

MiniMax's founder Yan Junjie has vowed to forgo his salary until the company reaches AGI, and to give away 5% of his shares. The backdrop is harder: an 80% stock slump, a flagging flagship model, and a discounted $2bn raise. The letter reads like a founder's article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story. The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, MiniMax moved to raise as much as $2bn from investors. Its shares have lost about 80% of their value since March. Yan Junjie, who is chief executive, chairman and chief technology officer, sent the pledge in an internal memo on Friday. The South China Morning Post saw the note, which a company executive then posted in full on X. "Effective today, and until the day we achieve AGI, I will no longer accept any salary from the company," Yan wrote. He signs off internally as "IO". He promised more than a pay cut. Over four years, Yan said he will hand out shares worth 4% of the company from his own holdings to reward staff. Another 1% will seed a fund for open-source projects. "We will keep going until we get there," the letter ends. The gesture and the ledger The pledge is stirring, and largely symbolic. A founder's wealth sits in equity, not in a monthly wage. Giving up the salary costs Yan little. Giving away 5% of his stake is the real commitment, and it doubles as a retention tool at a moment when Chinese AI talent is being poached hard. The timing is the tell. The memo landed alongside a large, discounted fundraise, the kind a company runs when it needs cash and needs to steady nerves. The optimism is aimed inward, at staff watching the share price fall. What the raise actually looks like The numbers are less romantic. MiniMax is selling 35.6 million new shares at HK$268 each, about $1.2bn, at a near-10% discount to Thursday's close, Bloomberg reports. It is pairing that with $6.5bn Hong Kong dollars of zero-coupon convertible bonds due 2027. Morgan Stanley and UBS are arranging the deal. The stock fell almost 10% on Friday. The new shares dilute a float that just grew, after a six-month lock-up on early backers expired. For retail holders who bought near the top, the raise stings. Why the stock cratered MiniMax listed in Hong Kong in January and is chasing a second listing in Shanghai. Then the models stopped landing. Its flagship M3, out in early June, struggled to win developers. The company halved the price of its most advanced model a week after launch, a move that read as weakness, not strategy. Rivals filled the gap. Zhipu's GLM-5.2, DeepSeek's V4 and Moonshot AI's models have pulled the attention MiniMax lost. The result is a company still building ambitious open models while its pricing power slips away, in a market already gripped by a brutal price war. Why it matters MiniMax is not raising in a vacuum. Chinese tech firms are flooding the market for AI cash. Zhipu pulled in $4bn this week, one of the largest Hong Kong share sales of the year. Investors still want exposure to Chinese AI, even as they punish the laggards. Not everyone is bearish. Goldman Sachs turned more positive on Friday, calling the valuation attractive and the model cost-efficient. So the real test is not the salary or the slogan. It is whether $2bn buys MiniMax enough time to ship a model that developers actually choose, before the next Chinese rival laps it again. The letter promises to keep going until AGI. The market is asking a shorter question: what have you shipped lately?

Open-source AI model developer MiniMax raises $2B in funding

MiniMax Group Inc., a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence developer, is raising $2 billion in funding. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that more than half the funds are expected to come from the sale of newly issued shares. According to the publication, the company will raise the remaining capital by issuing convertible bonds. Those are debt instruments that investors can turn into stock. MiniMax reportedly plans to follow up the raise by selling $6.5 billion worth of zero-coupon convertible bonds, which are convertible bonds that don't generate interest. They will enable investors to obtain 19.4 million shares priced 12.6% higher than the company's Thursday closing price. The bonds are reportedly due in 2027. Shares of MiniMax closed 9.8% lower on the news today. The company listed its shares in Hong Kong earlier this year through a public offering that raised about $619 million. MiniMax develops an eponymous series of open-source large language models. The company debuted its newest algorithm, MiniMax-M3, in June. It features 427 billion parameters and can process prompts that contain up to 1 million tokens. The process through which an LLM answers a prompt comprises two main steps known as the prefill and decode phases. MiniMax says that M3 can perform those steps 9 and 15 times faster, respectively, than its previous flagship LLM. The company credits the speedup to a technology it calls MiniMax Sparse Attention, or MSA. Graphics cards include two types of memory known as SRAM and HBM. LLMs regularly move data between them while performing inference. MiniMax's MSA technology uses a machine learning learning approach called FlashAttention to reduce the number of times an LLM shifts data between SRAM and HBM, which speeds up inference. MSA also optimizes model performance in other ways. It uses a technique known as block-sparse prefill to help M3 more quickly understand large prompts. Additionally, a quantization module compresses some of the data that the LLM generates to reduce its memory requirements. MiniMax's research focus also extends beyond LLMs. It has developed a family of open-source visual tokenizers known as the VTL series. A visualizer tokenizer is an AI model that turns images into vectors, abstract mathematical representations that LLMs can more easily process. MiniMax generates revenue with a cloud-based platform that provides access to hosted versions of its models. Additionally, the company offers paid multimedia generation apps geared towards consumers. The Information reported on Thursday that MiniMax Chief Executive Officer Yan Junjie had announced plans to forgo his salary until the company develops artificial general intelligence, or AGI. He also pledged to give away 5% of his shares. The equity will be used to finance employee incentives and open-source projects.

MiniMax says it has closed $2 bln funding round, outlines AGI commitments By Investing.com

Investing.com-- Chinese artificial intelligence startup MiniMax Group (HK:0100) has closed a new $2 billion funding round, according to a post on X by the company's Head of Developer Relations, Ryan Lee, as the firm doubles down on its pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Lee said MiniMax Chief Executive IO also announced three long-term commitments to employees alongside the fundraising. Get real-time updates on market-moving news with InvestingPro According to the post, the CEO will forgo taking a salary until the company achieves AGI, allocate shares equivalent to 4% of MiniMax's total equity from his personal holdings over the next four years to reward long-term employees, and dedicate an additional 1% of equity to support the open-source community. Separately, in an exchange filing, the company said it will raise about HK$16 billion ($2 billion) through a share placement and a zero-coupon convertible bond offering to fund AI infrastructure, model research and development, global expansion and its AI agent, or "Harness," products. The company said about 80% of the proceeds will be used to expand AI infrastructure and model R&D, citing surging demand after its enterprise and developer customer base grew to more than 1 million by the end of June from about 200,000 at the end of 2025, while its consumer products reached roughly 300 million global users.

MiniMax Shares Drop on $2 Billion Fundraising Plan

Shares of MiniMax dropped, after the Chinese artificial-intelligence company disclosed a plan to raise $2 billion through a share placement and convertible-bond offering. The Shanghai-based company plans to raise about 9.54 billion Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to US$1.22 billion, by placing 35.6 million shares at HK$268.00 each. The price represents a 9.89% discount to the last closing price of HK$297.40 a share, MiniMax said Friday. Additionally, the company plans to issue zero-coupon bonds to raise an additional HK$6.5 billion. The bonds can be converted into 19.4 million shares at an initial conversion price of HK$335.00 a share, representing a 12.64% premium to last closing price. The stock was 12% lower at HK$260.80 at the midday break, underperforming the Hang Seng Tech Index's 2.7% gain. Share prices usually drop when companies offer convertible bonds, as they lead to equity dilution for existing shareholders. MiniMax plans to use the proceeds from the share placement and convertible-bond offering to build AI infrastructure and conduct research and development. Morgan Stanley and UBS are the placing agents for MiniMax. The fundraising comes as AI companies increase spending on computing infrastructure and large-language-model development. On Thursday, Zhipu AI revealed plans to raise $4 billion to support growth. Last month, DeepSeek raised more than US$7.4 billion in its first funding round to support business expansion. That deal valued the Chinese firm at more than US$50 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. MiniMax's share price is likely to remain under pressure in the near term, Citi analysts said in a research note. "We believe negative sentiment, uncertainty over user retention and monetization strategy are likely to remain near-term overhangs," they said.

China's MiniMax seeks to raise total $2.05 billion via share sale, bond issue

July 10 (Reuters) - China's MiniMax Group said on Friday it is seeking to raise HK$16.04 billion ($2.05 billion) in fresh capital via a share sale and a bond issue to fund growth in its AI business. The fundraising comes as Chinese tech companies capitalise on strong investor appetite to fund their research, hiring and expansion plans. AI startup MiniMax said in a Hong Kong exchange filing that it plans to raise about HK$9.54 billion by offering 35.6 million new Class A shares at HK$268 each, a 9.9% discount to the stock's last close. It is also proposing zero-coupon bonds worth HK$6.50 billion due 2027, convertible into Class A shares at an initial HK$335 apiece, a 12.6% premium to the last close. MiniMax said proceeds from both deals would be used for research and development, commercialisation, working capital and other general corporate purposes. MiniMax's fundraising follows similar activities by other Hong Kong-listed tech firms, with Zhipu AI and GPU designer Iluvatar CoreX unveiling plans on Thursday to raise HK$31.41 billion and HK$7.07 billion, respectively. ($1 = 7.8365 Hong Kong dollars) (Reporting by Nikita Maria Jino in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Subhranshu Sahu)