Adds details, quotes and background on MiniMax including monthly active users, sponsors and overall coordinators

By Shi Bu and James Pomfret

Dec 21 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup MiniMax has passed a Hong Kong stock exchange listing hearing, according to a stock exchange filing on Sunday, with sources having earlier told Reuters the firm is seeking to raise up to HK$5 billion ($643 million) in the flotation.

MiniMax had filed confidentially for a Hong Kong initial public offering earlier in the year, which could happen before the end of 2025, three people with knowledge of the matter had told Reuters in July.

MiniMax could raise HK$4 billion to HK$5 billion in the IPO, one of the sources said, with an overall valuation of the firm at $4 billion.

China International Capital Corp 601995.SS and UBS UBSG.S have been hired as sponsors for the IPO, the disclosures showed, though no specifics were given on the size of the IPO.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are overall coordinators alongside the two sponsors, it said in the Sunday disclosures.

After this approval, the firm can proceed to launch its IPO.

"MiniMax is a global AI foundation model company. Founded by a group of forward thinking engineers, we are committed to driving AI innovation towards performing the full range of human intellectual tasks, from learning and reasoning to planning and generalizing knowledge," the firm wrote in the document.

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, this year has boosted investor interest in domestic AI products and in the sector.

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.

The firm said in the document its monthly active user figures for its products had risen more than six times from 3.1 million in 2023 to 19.1 million in 2024, and to 27.6 million in the nine months to the end of September 2025.

It said cumulative users of its AI-native products as of September 2025 had reached 200 million individual users and over 100,000 enterprises and developers, in more than 200 countries and regions.

"Our number of paying users for AI-native products expanded from around 119,700 in 2023 to around 650,300 in 2024, and further to approximately 1,771,600 in the nine months ended September 30, 2025," it added in the document.

Its R&D team of around 300 members includes experts formerly with global AI leaders such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek, the firm added.

($1 = 7.7808 Hong Kong dollars)

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Bu Shi in Beijing; James Pomfret and Kane Wu in Hong Kong; Editing by Ros Russell)

((Shi.Bu@thomsonreuters.com;))