MiniMax Raises $2 Billion, CEO Swears Off Salary Until AGI Is Achieved

Yan Junjie, the founder and CEO of Chinese AI startup MiniMax, has made a bet that few executives would dare put on paper: he will take zero salary from today until the company achieves AGI.

The pledge came as part of a fundraising announcement that could land the Shanghai-based company roughly $2 billion (about 16 billion HKD), split between a share placement and convertible bonds.

The deal breaks down into two parts. MiniMax plans to place 35.6 million Class A shares at 267.99 HKD each, raising around 9.5 billion HKD (about 8.3 billion RMB) before costs. Separately, it will issue 6.5 billion HKD in convertible bonds. All told, the net proceeds should land around 15.96 billion HKD (roughly 13.85 billion RMB).

The company said 80% of the funds — about 12.77 billion HKD — will go toward AI infrastructure and model research. That covers training, inference, and the hardware stack needed to keep MiniMax competitive in a Chinese AI sector that has been running a quiet arms race since US chip export controls tightened. Another 10% is earmarked for global commercialization of Harness, MiniMax’s AI-native product for developers, while the remaining 10% covers general corporate use and operating expenses.

The funding structure — a share placement alongside convertible notes — suggests MiniMax is diversifying its capital sources rather than betting the company on a single valuation event. Convertible bonds give the company flexibility to raise money without immediately diluting existing shareholders at a potentially unfavorable price.

But the real headline is Yan’s personal commitment. In an internal letter to employees, the CEO said he will not draw any salary from the company until AGI is achieved. He also pledged 4% of his personal shares — equivalent to 4% of the company’s total equity — as a long-term incentive pool for employees who stay and build with him over the next four years. An additional 1% of his shares will fund a dedicated program to support the open-source community.

The move echoes a pattern seen in a handful of Chinese tech founders who have made dramatic personal sacrifices to signal conviction during turbulent periods. It also speaks to the intensity of the AGI race in China, where labs like MiniMax, Baidu, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are competing for engineering talent and compute resources in a market where the best people can name their price.

MiniMax previously made headlines when it open-sourced its M3 model in June and disclosed plans for M3 Pro, a 2.7 trillion parameter model that would be one of the largest openly available AI systems in the world. This latest funding round suggests the company intends to stay in that race, and that its CEO is willing to bet his own paycheck on the outcome.