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MiniMax

Chinese AI company building multimodal foundation models for text, audio, image, video, and music.

Updated April 2026

Overview

Founded
2021
Headquarters
Shanghai, China
Segment
Frontier Foundation Model Labs
Posture
Regional / Emerging

Product overview

MiniMax develops proprietary multimodal LLMs like MiniMax-M2.7 series (text/agentic), Hailuo video generation, Speech-02 TTS/STT, image-01, and music models, accessible via API platform. Consumer apps include Talkie (AI characters, 11M MAU), Hailuo AI (text-to-video), and MiniMax Agent. Used by over 200M global users and 214K enterprise clients/developers, standing out with ultra-long context (1M tokens), efficient MoE architecture, and strong Asian language support versus Western labs.

Revenue model

API pay-per-use ($0.3/M input/$1.2/M output tokens for M2.7; $0.19 per 6s video) and monthly subscriptions (Starter $10/mo, Max $50/mo; up to $150/mo highspeed); consumer app in-app purchases and AI-native product revenue ($53M in 2025).

Moat

MiniMax's competitive moat stems from its native multimodality architecture trained simultaneously across text, speech, music, and video from inception, combined with a diversified consumer-to-enterprise revenue model that generates rapid iteration loops and viral adoption optionality. This integrated multimodal foundation—evidenced by its 88.6% VIBE score—creates genuine technical differentiation difficult to replicate, while its consumer products (Talkie at 35% of revenue, Hailuo AI at 33%) serve as both profit centers and R&D laboratories that accelerate model improvement at lower cost than pure enterprise competitors.