Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Zhipu AI and MiniMax have shown early signs of sustainable commercialisation of their AI models, analysts said, as investors continue to pump up their Hong Kong stocks despite widening losses.
That assessment comes as the companies reported their first earnings since their respective initial public offerings in early January, providing a glimpse into the business models of an industry still in its infancy globally.
The South China Morning Post takes a look into their business models and provides the management view on outlook, along with analysts’ comments.
How do Zhipu and MiniMax make money?
Pure-play AI companies organise their business models around their AI models, differentiating them from more established tech giants that integrate their models with more lucrative offerings such as cloud services.
Beijing-based Zhipu’s business revolves around its model-as-a-service platform, where the company’s in-house AI models primarily serve institutional clients, either through local deployment in which user data is hosted on-premise or via the cloud.
Shanghai-based MiniMax has more diverse revenue streams, stemming from a similar enterprise-facing model serving business as well as two popular consumer-facing apps – the video generation platform Hailuo AI and AI companion app Talkie.
How much money did they make in 2025?
Known as Z.ai internationally, Zhipu reported revenue of 724.33 million yuan (US$104.8 million) last year, a 131.9 per cent year-on-year increase. MiniMax’s revenue totalled US$79 million in 2025, a 159 per cent year-on-year jump.
What are their plans for 2026 and beyond?
The financial results cover a period before the two start-ups saw their international profiles rise significantly following their IPOs.
Both companies reported significant upticks this year in demand as agentic AI is poised to drive up AI token consumption – the core metric of AI usage – with both companies quickly rolling out integrations of open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw.
MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie said the company’s annual recurring revenue as of February had already crossed more than US$150 million, double the previous year’s earnings, on the back of growing enterprise demand.
Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng said the company was seeing a “boom” in demand despite raising prices for its API or application programming interface – how customers access models through the cloud – by 83 per cent in the first quarter, with the volume of requests jumping 400 per cent.
The company aims to make cloud deployment a bigger share of revenue, Zhang said, citing as a benchmark US start-up Anthropic, which makes most of its money from enterprise clients.
How has the market reacted?
Both companies have seen their share prices more than quintuple since their listings. This investor frenzy continued on Wednesday, with Zhipu and MiniMax’s shares rising 32 per cent and 14 per cent, respectively, on the back of their earnings release.
This pushed the market caps of the two companies to new highs of HK$407.95 billion and HK$332.45 billion, respectively, on par with more established Chinese tech giants such as Kuaishou and JD.com, despite much lower revenues and continued unprofitability.
What are analysts saying?
Huatai Securities analysts said in a note on Wednesday that Zhipu’s shift towards cloud-based deployment – from 15.5 per cent of total revenue in 2024 to 26.3 per cent in 2025 – put the company on a more sustainable footing long-term, as agentic AI tools were expected to grow in popularity this year.
Meanwhile, Guosen Securities analysts last month forecast a “significant increase” in demand for MiniMax model tokens this year as the underlying models continue to improve.
However, some analysts warned that Zhipu and MiniMax’s valuations were unsustainable in the long term. Jose Maria Macedo, founder of US research firm Delphi Digital, said that the two companies were trading at multiples of 400 times revenue, far above those of OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Part of what’s holding Zhipu and Minimax at these levels is that they’re currently the only way to get exposure to the Chinese AI narrative, which commands its own premium,” he said on X last week.
“That changes as more companies come to market and dilute it.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
