By Kane Wu, Liam Mo and Che Pan
HONG KONG (Reuters) -Chinese AI startup MiniMax has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong initial public offering, targeting a valuation of over $4 billion in the flotation, which could happen before the end of this year, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
MiniMax could raise HK$4 billion to HK$5 billion ($510 million to $637 million) in the IPO, one of the sources said.
China International Capital Corp and UBS have been hired as sponsors for the IPO, the sources said.
The IPO size and valuation could change, subject to market conditions, added the sources, all of whom declined to be named as the information was not public.
MiniMax and CICC did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
UBS declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal first reported MiniMax’s Hong Kong IPO filing on Wednesday.
MiniMax is among the first batch of Chinese artificial intelligence companies to seek a public listing. The rise of DeepSeek, China’s answer to ChatGPT, earlier this year has boosted interest in domestic AI products and in the sector from investors.
Rival Zhipu AI in April also kicked off onshore IPO plans with CICC as its sponsor, Reuters reported at the time, citing a regulatory filing.
Founded in early 2022 by former SenseTime executive Yan Junjie, MiniMax has emerged as one of China’s prominent AI companies during the generative AI boom.
The company develops multimodal AI models including MiniMax M1, Hailuo-02, Speech-02 and Music-01, which can process text, audio, images, video and music.
MiniMax’s models and products have served over 157 million individual users across over 200 countries and regions, and more than 50,000 enterprises and developers across over 90 countries and regions, its website says.
The company, which has raised over $850 million since 2023, counts Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group and an entity under Tencent Holdings, as well as Hongshan Capital Group, Hillhouse Investment and Yunqi Capital, as investors, according to media reports.
($1 = 7.8496 Hong Kong dollars)
(Reporting by Kane Wu in Hong Kong and Liam Mo and Che Pan in Beijing. Additional reporting by Scott Murdoch in Sydney. Editing by Joe Bavier and Mark Potter)
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