Bio

Yan Junjie is a Chinese computer scientist, born in 1989 in Xiayi County, Shangqiu, Henan province. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of MiniMax, the Shanghai-headquartered foundation-model company he established in December 2021 with fellow former SenseTime researcher Zhou Yucong. As of May 2026 he leads MiniMax following the company's January 2026 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing, on which the shares closed up 109 percent on debut at HKD 345.

Education

Yan earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Southeast University in Nanjing, then completed a doctorate at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2015. He continued with postdoctoral research in deep learning and computer vision in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University.

Career

Yan joined SenseTime as an intern in 2015 and rose to vice president, deputy dean of the SenseTime research institute, and chief technology officer of the company's Smart City business group. During the SenseTime period he led work on general-purpose computer-vision models and large-scale Smart City deployments, and published over one hundred papers in top deep-learning and computer-vision venues with a Google Scholar citation count exceeding ten thousand.

He pivoted from computer vision to natural language processing after watching OpenAI Five defeat professional Dota 2 teams in 2019, an event he has cited in interviews as the moment he became persuaded that scaling reinforcement learning and large neural networks would be the dominant research direction. The MiniMax name itself derives from the minimax algorithm in game theory.

Yan co-founded MiniMax in December 2021 with Zhou Yucong, also formerly of SenseTime. The company released its Hailuo consumer chat assistant and the MiniMax-01 series of open-weights models, including a long-context Mixture-of-Experts foundation model that adopted a Lightning Attention architecture. The company has also developed video generation models in the Hailuo Video line and audio generation models.

MiniMax completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026 at HKD 100 billion (approximately $12.8 billion), following Z.AI onto the exchange in the same month. Press coverage at the time of the listing estimated Yan's net worth at $3.2 to $3.5 billion. Outside research, he is known as a Dota 2 player using the handle "IO" after the wisp hero.

Notable contributions

Yan's published research record from the SenseTime period covers computer vision, object detection, and large-scale image classification. The MiniMax period has produced a sequence of open-weights model releases.

• MiniMax founding (December 2021). Co-founded the Shanghai-headquartered foundation-model company.
• MiniMax-01 series. Long-context Mixture-of-Experts foundation models with the Lightning Attention architecture.
• Hailuo consumer assistant and Hailuo Video generation models.
• MiniMax IPO (January 2026). Hong Kong Stock Exchange debut at HKD 100 billion valuation.
• Computer-vision research portfolio. Over one hundred papers across top deep-learning and computer-vision venues from the SenseTime period.

Affiliations

• Southeast University: Bachelor's student.
• Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences: Doctoral student, completed 2015.
• Tsinghua University: Postdoctoral researcher, deep learning and computer vision.
• SenseTime: Intern, then Vice President; Deputy Dean of the research institute; CTO of the Smart City business group, 2015 to 2021.
• MiniMax: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, December 2021 to present.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Yan is one of the four chief executives commonly grouped as the "AI Tigers" of the Chinese frontier-startup cohort, alongside Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI, Tang Jie and Zhang Peng of Z.AI, and Wang Xiaochuan of Baichuan. The MiniMax product portfolio is the broadest of the cohort, spanning text, image, video, and audio generation, and the January 2026 Hong Kong listing produced one of the largest first-day gains for any Chinese AI company on a public exchange.

The MiniMax research direction has emphasized architectural exploration over the dense Transformer baseline, including the Lightning Attention mechanism in the MiniMax-01 series and substantial Mixture-of-Experts work. Industry coverage has characterized the open-weights orientation as a structural commitment alongside paid API distribution rather than a marketing-only stance, in line with peer Chinese open-weights releases from DeepSeek and Alibaba Qwen.

Sources

• Yan Junjie. Wikipedia biographical entry covering education, the SenseTime period, the MiniMax founding, and the January 2026 IPO.
• Junjie Yan Bloomberg profile. Bloomberg executive biography.
• MiniMax Investor Relations management page. Official corporate biography on MiniMax's investor relations site.
• Junjie Yan Google Scholar. Google Scholar profile from the SenseTime computer-vision period.
• Junjie Yan Crunchbase. Crunchbase entry.
• Yan Junjie, founder of Chinese AI firm MiniMax, becomes billionaire at 36. VnExpress International coverage of the January 2026 IPO and personal net worth.