China’s MiniMax sees revenue nearly quadruple in first half as AI demand surges

Aug 26 (Reuters) – Chinese AI startup MiniMax on Wednesday posted a nearly four-fold jump in first-half revenue as demand for its low-cost models and AI platform accelerated, with the company continuing to target cheaper ways to deploy AI at scale.

Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose 283.1% from a year earlier to $116.6 million, reflecting surging demand for cheaper, open-source-based models from Chinese providers such as MiniMax and DeepSeek, which position themselves as lower-cost alternatives to proprietary U.S. systems.

• MiniMax said it will keep pushing to extend the “performance-cost frontier,” first getting performance to a level that can handle complex real-world tasks and then improving efficiency to allow capabilities to be rolled out more widely and affordably.

• Revenue from its Open Platform and other AI-based enterprise services surged 703.1% to $73.9 million as paying users grew.

• The segment contributed 63.4% of the startup’s total revenue during the period, up from 30.3% a year earlier.

• Revenue from its AI-native products rose 100.9% to $42.6 million.

• MiniMax remains a loss-making company, though its half-year loss attributable narrowed to $358 million from $402.2 million last year.

• MiniMax was one of the “AI tigers” to go public this year, raising HK$4.82 billion ($614.86 million) in its Hong Kong listing before its stock nearly doubled on its first trading day.

• The Chinese tech firm also raised HK$16.04 billion in fresh capital through a share sale and a bond issue last month to fund growth in its AI business.

($1 = 7.8392 Hong Kong dollars)

(Reporting by Sneha Kumar and Shruti Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda)