MiniMax, the company behind the AI content platform Hailuo AI, has been making waves in the artificial intelligence space. Unlike many of its competitors who are focused on price wars to gain customers, MiniMax appears to be one of the more financially secure companies in the industry. Each of its large models corresponds to a specific application, giving it a strong foundation. MiniMax’s International Business General Manager, Sheng Jingyuan, once stated that MiniMax may be one of the first large model companies to achieve self-sufficiency and profitability in a short period.
While its emotional companionship product, Talkie, was once a star in the overseas Chinese social application market, it was removed from app stores in some countries late last year. This has led MiniMax to shift its business focus to Hailuo AI, which is seen as a less risky venture. For example, the company has unified its brand identity, renaming the original AI assistant “Hailuo AI” to MiniMax, while reserving the “Hailuo” name for its video generation business.
However, with policy acting as a sword hanging over its head, MiniMax faces more than just the technical challenge of “whether the product is easy to use.”
From AI ‘Creating Characters’ to Million-Dollar Cinematography
MiniMax’s three products, Talkie, Xingye, and Hailuo AI, have all received positive feedback in the market. In June 2023, MiniMax launched Talkie, an AI companionship product, overseas. Three months later, Xingye, which offers similar features, was launched in China.
At the time, Talkie’s biggest selling point was AI character customization. Users could create private AI entities on the platform, customizing their appearance, voice characteristics, and personality to create a personalized companion.
‘The overseas and domestic versions have similar functions. They provide emotional companionship and allow you to ‘create characters,’ focusing on a purely wholesome experience (with sensitive words filtered out to avoid explicit content),’ said Chen Shan (pseudonym), an AI companionship product user.
While most large model manufacturers were competing to showcase their technical prowess and promote the advantages of their large models, MiniMax was the first to find a commercialization entry point based on user experience.
‘The amazing thing is that most users treat Talkie and Xingye as companionship toys rather than AI tools. Their large model attributes are weakened, and the focus is more on emotional warmth,’ Chen Shan added.
Talkie’s card gameplay was also unique at the time. Users had the opportunity to obtain CG cards when interacting with AI characters. They could purchase diamonds to gain extra card draw opportunities. In addition to being collectible, the cards could also be traded in the card shop.
In addition to card gameplay, Talkie also offered scenario-based chat strategies and chat backgrounds, allowing users to freely select AI characters by swiping left or right.
‘These types of products have strong user stickiness. Through card gameplay and character design, they meet users’ personalization and emotional needs, outputting emotional value and achieving precise penetration of the ACG (anime, comics, and games) and otome (female-oriented game) player base,’ Chen Shan analyzed.
Talkie’s previous marketing materials often featured real people playing the game, focusing on the sweet romance between users and AI. In the early days, among the AI characters with the top 10 number of connections, 8 were male and 2 were female. This gameplay was well-received overseas, and Talkie quickly expanded to countries and regions such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.
In contrast, the AI companionship product Xingye, launched in China, felt more like a harem ‘flipping cards’ for female users. Your first love is a triad boss, your newlywed husband is your childhood sweetheart who is also your mortal enemy, your domineering boss is secretly in love with you… It basically rehashed all the tropes of early romance novels.
In Xingye, interacting with AI characters also allowed you to obtain Xingnian cards. Unlocking extra cards required recharging with Xing diamonds, with 6 yuan equaling 600 diamonds, and opening a Xingnian card requiring 200 diamonds.
Compared to emotional value products like Talkie and Xingye, Hailuo AI is a purely productive tool.
In Hailuo AI, users can generate videos from text and images. Compared to similar products, Hailuo’s generated image quality is realistic, and its cinematic-level camera movements are a highlight.
Currently, Hailuo AI’s main users are film and television content creators and animation CG content creators, which can appropriately solve the problems of high production costs and long cycles in traditional CG content creation.
In general, generating a 3-5 second video requires dozens of shells (the in-app currency). The basic version of the membership provides 1,000 shells per month, with membership fees of 68 yuan/month, 183 yuan/quarter, and 738 yuan/year. The standard version of the membership, with 4,500 shells per month, costs 248 yuan/month, 666 yuan/quarter, and 2,648 yuan/year.
From emotional companionship to video generation tools, MiniMax has covered the most popular AI application scenarios.
‘King of Low Profile’ Comes Out of the Mountain
MiniMax founder Yan Junjie previously served as Vice President, Deputy Dean of the Research Institute, and CTO of the Smart City Business Group at SenseTime, responsible for building deep learning toolchains and underlying algorithms, as well as the development of general-purpose AI technology.
In December 2021 (on the eve of SenseTime’s IPO), Yan Junjie, who had already left SenseTime, founded MiniMax, focusing on the research and development and application of general artificial intelligence (AGI). His obsession with multi-modal large models came from a conversation with his grandfather.
‘My grandfather wanted to write a book about his experiences over the past few decades, but this required a very strong organizational ability and typing skills. AI might be able to help him realize this idea.’ In Yan Junjie’s view, the content that people consume every day is mostly in the form of images and videos, with text accounting for a relatively small proportion. To reach more users, the only way is to output multi-modal content.
Compared to other large model products that are desperately competing on technology and parameters, MiniMax has always insisted on ‘integrated production and modeling,’ ensuring that all base models serve the product.
For example, the text model corresponds to the MiniMax assistant, the video model corresponds to Hailuo AI, and Xingye and Talkie are the culmination of large model technology.
‘Integrated production and modeling’ is essentially about striking a balance between technological iteration and product experience optimization.
According to MiniMax’s technical staff, the company’s early product applications iterated quickly. Whether it was the product or the model, it basically iterated on a weekly basis. The research and development department conducted a large number of experiments, and they received feedback on the progress of their work every week.
This allowed MiniMax to launch the companionship product Glow just one year after its founding. ‘This application is still regarded by many AI players as a ‘white moonlight’ in the field of emotional companionship,’ Chen Shan said.
Unfortunately, Glow was taken down after only half a year of being online, suspected of being regulated due to the platform’s dialogue involving ‘risqué’ content.
The iteration of star social products is even faster.
Talkie employees told the self-media ‘Intelligent Emergence’ that each design of Talkie is quickly iterated based on user feedback. At its peak, the product team could propose more than 20 requirements that needed to be met within a week.
MiniMax’s main revenue comes from emotional companionship products, with the main charging methods being advertising and subscription recharges. Talkie is undoubtedly the main force.
App Annie data shows that from April 1, 2023, to the end of March 2025, Talkie’s total revenue on the App Store was $3.218 million. From September 2023 to the end of March 2025, Xingye’s (only launched in China) total revenue was $244,000.
According to 36Kr, Talkie’s annual revenue in 2024 may exceed $70 million.
However, in December 2024, Talkie was removed from the App Store in the US market. A month earlier, Talkie had been removed from the App Store in the Japanese market. According to industry analysts, with the popularity of Chinese social applications overseas, this removal may be related to geopolitical factors.
Although Yan Junjie re-explained the relationship between technology and products in an interview with ‘LatePost’ in January of this year, saying that ‘better applications and more users do not lead to better models’ and ‘technology outweighs everything at critical moments,’ the earlier concept of integrated production and modeling has been enough for MiniMax to establish its own ‘moat.’
User Volume Declines, Competition is Fierce
In addition to emotional companionship, MiniMax is also looking for more stable commercial landing scenarios.
On August 31, 2024, MiniMax officially launched the video generation function. In just one month after its release, Hailuo AI’s monthly visits surged by 860%.
SimilarWeb shows that Hailuo AI still maintains excellent data performance. Its global monthly visits, average visit duration, and bounce rate even surpass those of other well-known video generation websites such as OpenAI’s Sora and PIKA. The international version supports localization in 180 languages.
MiniMax has not only unified its external brand image, but also intends to acquire Luying Technology, a startup focused on AI generation of ACG content.
In the short term, although Hailuo AI is gaining momentum, emotional companionship products still contribute most of MiniMax’s revenue.
Yan Junjie previously revealed that the C-end business accounts for 80% of the company. Regarding MiniMax’s current commercialization, he said that there are two paths: one is that more than 30,000 enterprise users and developers have gathered on the open platform; and the other is the advertising mechanism in the company’s products, which can achieve commercial realization.
Hailuo AI is a tool-type application and is still in its early stages of development. The emotional companionship market, which focuses on C-end payment, has strong demand and high user stickiness, which can help users realize emotional value and support that they cannot obtain in real life.
However, the overall user scale of AI products seems to be slowing down. In the new downloads in September 2024, the top 15 AI products generally showed a data decline of about 30%. Xingye fell out of the million-level tier with a drop of nearly 30%. From the perspective of user activity, the activity of old users has stabilized, but the three/seven-day retention rate of new users has declined by about 7% overall.
In the AI companionship product track, the current traffic and users have not yet experienced large-scale growth, but the number of competitors is endless.
In China, in addition to MiniMax’s Xingye, ByteDance’s Maoxiang, Yuewen’s incubated Zhumeng Island, and Xiaobing’s X Eva, even tool-type intelligent assistants such as Doubao can freely talk with various AI entities and provide emotional value. Not to mention SpicyChat, Poe, FLAI, Maopao Duck and other niche emotional companionship products, which attract many players with a less sensitive content environment.
‘It is difficult for an emotional companionship product to meet all the needs of users, such as character intelligence, smooth reply and long memory time, tolerance for sensitive words, strong plot, and low price. Most players will use multiple emotional companionship products at the same time, and change one when they get tired of it,’ Chen Shan said.
Faced with young users who are not very ‘loyal,’ emotional companionship products obviously cannot rely on ‘risqué’ content to retain them.
Emotional companionship has always been a business that large companies are cautious about participating in, because it involves security and privacy risks. If they want to go overseas, they have to face more uncertain policy factors.
MiniMax’s B2B Strategy
In terms of To B business, MiniMax has mature voice large model capabilities, mainly based on the API sales model. The main landing scenarios include role-playing, AI customer service, smart hardware, AI education, office, and recruitment. Currently, more than 30,000 companies have access.
Many large model companies will customize API services for customers, rather than providing standardized products. MiniMax’s overseas business does not provide customized services for customers, and the overall product delivery model is lightweight.
The AI market in the 2B direction has always been the domain of large companies.
In May 2024, Zhipu AI took the lead in announcing that the price of entry-level large models was reduced from 0.005 yuan/thousand tokens to 0.001 yuan/thousand tokens, a straight drop of 80%. Subsequently, ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, iFlytek and other companies successively reduced the prices of large models. Some API call fees for large models facing the B-end market fell to 0 yuan, and the price war for large models had already begun.
The 2B business is a difficult nut to crack. Faced with large companies’ investment in financial resources and manpower, the remaining companies can only find another way. At the beginning of this year, MiniMax co-founder and vice president Wei Wei has left the company. He was previously responsible for the commercialization business in the To B direction and held important positions in Tencent Cloud and Baidu Smart Cloud.
MiniMax International Business General Manager Sheng Jingyuan emphasized in an interview with the media that ‘we are not doing chat or AI emotional companionship, but a new generation of content generation platform.’
Only doing ‘China’s AI companion giant’ is not enough to describe MiniMax’s ambitions. However, in the context of unclear policies and the fledgling AI tool business, MiniMax’s move to the center of the stage may just be a smokescreen. After all, the real invisible champion never cares whether everyone knows ‘he is good.’