MiniMax went public in Hong Kong less than five months ago. Its shares have since roughly quadrupled. Now the Chinese AI startup wants to do it again, closer to home.
In a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Sunday, MiniMax said it is exploring a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, the mainland’s tech-focused board, and has entered a tutoring agreement, the formal first step Chinese regulators require before an IPO.
The move would turn MiniMax’s Hong Kong debut into a so-called A+H structure, with yuan-denominated shares on the mainland alongside its Hong Kong listing.
The company has hired advisers to guide it through the STAR Market’s requirements. Any share sale, it cautioned, would depend on market conditions and regulatory approvals, the standard hedge that keeps an early-stage exploration from reading as a done deal.
The numbers behind the ambition explain the timing. MiniMax raised about $619 million in its January Hong Kong IPO, pricing at HK$165 a share and valuing the company near $6.5 billion.
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The stock more than doubled on its first day and kept climbing; by late May it was trading around HK$840, a gain of roughly 400% from the offer price. A run like that is exactly the kind of momentum a company tries to bank a second time.
Founded in 2021 by former SenseTime executives, MiniMax builds large language and multimodal models that generate text, audio, video and music, and sells access to enterprises through APIs alongside its consumer apps.
It sits in the front rank of China’s AI contenders, the cohort that includes DeepSeek, Moonshot and Zhipu, all racing to convert technical credibility into public-market capital ahead of their US peers.
Its backer list reads like a roster of the firms betting on that cohort: Alibaba, Tencent, the games studio miHoYo and IDG Capital among earlier investors, with cornerstones in the Hong Kong float reportedly including Singapore’s GIC, Baillie Gifford and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
A mainland listing would give MiniMax access to a deeper, more domestic pool of capital, and to investors who cannot easily buy Hong Kong shares.
That domestic tilt is the strategic core of the decision. Chinese AI firms are operating in a market where US capital is increasingly fenced off and Beijing has signalled it wants its champions funded at home, which makes a yuan listing as much a political alignment as a financial one.
Raising onshore capital also matters for a company whose costs run on compute, in a country pushing hard to build an AI stack independent of American chips.
For now it is an exploration, not a prospectus, and the STAR Market’s approval process is its own gauntlet.
But the direction is clear enough. After one of the most dramatic AI listings the region has seen, MiniMax is moving to raise again, on home turf, while the market is still willing to pay up for the story.
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