The 36-year-old now has an estimated net worth of US$3.2 billion after MiniMax’s initial public offering (IPO) last week, according to Forbes.
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Yan Junjie, chairman and CEO of AI startup MiniMax. Photo by AFP |
The Shanghai-based company raised HKD$4.8 billion ($618 million) in the offering. The company said it plans to channel most of the IPO proceeds into further model development
Yan’s rise in wealth follows a similar development earlier, when the Hong Kong listing of rival AI model developer Zhipu pushed its chairman, Liu Debing, into billionaire territory.
However, MiniMax’s flotation generated stronger enthusiasm. Zhipu shares ended their first trading day up 13.2%, after briefly slipping below their IPO price.
Investors are more optimistic about MiniMax because of its international focus and its emphasis on private-sector clients that pay to use its speech-, image- and video-generation models, according to Ke Yan, Singapore-based head of research at DZT Research.
Before launching MiniMax in 2021, Yan spent more than six years at Hong Kong-listed AI firm SenseTime, where he served as deputy head of its research institute, according to the prospectus.
As an avid gamer, Yan first took an interest in OpenAI in 2019 after its bots defeated the world’s elite human teams in the battle-arena game Dota 2.
Captivated, he devoured the San Francisco startup’s research papers, prompting a career move from computer vision to natural language processing.
MiniMax in the early days was met with much skepticism, and went through what Yan called “pure agony” over the three years before delivering its flagship large language model called “M2,” according to Bloomberg.
“At the time, we were met with total cynicism. I spoke with the technical heads of two of China’s largest tech giants, and they were blunt: they thought our vision was a hoax,” Yan said.
But he persevered with a focus on optimizing development efficiency. Now counting some 212 million cumulative users, his mission to export cost-efficient AI is finding early success.
MiniMax is expanding rapidly. Revenue in the first nine months of 2025 nearly tripled to $53.4 million. At the same time, losses widened almost 70% year on year to $512 million, reflecting heavy spending on research.
Among MiniMax’s clients is Chinese gaming giant miHoYo, state-run Securities Times reports. Known for mobile hits such as “Genshin Impact,” miHoYo was also an early investor in MiniMax.
MiniMax’s goal is to make AI tools more accessible and affordable to users, Yan said.
“As AI capabilities continue to scale, we have to ask: will these models be concentrated among a select few at a prohibitive $1,000 monthly premium, or will they be accessible to the masses at a $20 price point?” he asked.
“Ultimately, it’s about delivering tangible value. If you execute, both users and the capital markets will buy in.”
