Yan Junjie, the billionaire founder, chairman and CEO of Chinese AI model developer MiniMax Group, has seen his fortune more than double to $7.8 billion on Forbes' World’s Real-Time Billionaires List just months after the firm’s $618 million Hong Kong IPO in January, thanks to soaring demand for its AI products that are attracting customers worldwide.

The 37-year-old mogul derives his wealth from a stake in the Shanghai-based company. Its shares have rallied 400% from their listing price, including a 9.5% jump on Tuesday after MiniMax reported Monday better-than-expected results for 2025. It was the first time the company announced earnings as a publicly listed firm.

MiniMax surged as much as 21% during the day before paring some of the gains. Still, investors looked past heavy financial losses to focus on growth potential, says Kenny Ng, a Hong Kong-based securities strategist at Everbright Securities International. Revenues jumped 158.9% year-on-year to $79 million, while losses for the year expanded over 300% to $1.9 billion, mostly due to changes in the value of financial liabilities, including certain preferred shares.

“The demand placed on our platform will expand to an entirely new magnitude,” Yan said in a statement as part of the company's annual results.

Founded in 2021, MiniMax now sports a market capitalization of HK$258.4 billion ($33 billion), approaching that of more established Chinese internet giants such as short video company Kuaishou ($HK262.5 billion) and e-commerce giant JD.com ($HK320.4 billion). Yan, who first became a billionaire in January after MiniMax’s IPO, is seeing the company’s text-, audio– and video-generating models being used worldwide.

Last year MiniMax generated over 70% of sales from overseas markets, according to the firm. This year, it attracted new users such as billionaire Ivan Zhao’s productivity software company Notion, which turned to MiniMax’s latest model to power its AI agents, the Chinese firm announced in an emailed statement.

Released in February, the M2.5 AI model is capable of reasoning and handling tasks like writing software codes. Its performance rivals that of billionaire Dario Amodei’s Anthropic’s latest Claude Opus 4.6 model in some respects, according to MiniMax. In his statement, Yan also predicted that his AI would become smarter and smarter.

AI would evolve from a tool to a “collaborative, colleague-level partner,” Yan wrote in the statement. It would also produce more ready-to-use mid-to long-form content, in formats that might be similar to streaming. “We will deepen our commercialization initiatives and expand global market opportunities, empowering users and partners worldwide with greater intelligence,” the billionaire wrote.

© Forbes