(Bloomberg) — Chinese startup MiniMax Group Ltd. spent its first three years largely on the sidelines of the generative-AI boom. As rivals chased local ChatGPT clones, the Shanghai-based team tackled a harder problem: building a single model capable of processing text, speech and video.

Founder Yan Junjie sums up the period in one word: “Painful.”

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“It took four years to reach this point — the first three were defined by pure agony,” Yan said in an interview with Bloomberg in November. But the strategy to pursue multi-modal capabilities has paid off. When his foundation model M2 finally hit the market in October 2025, it quickly gained traction with developers around the world. The company has served at least 212 million users across consumer products, from AI avatars to its Hailuo video generator.

MiniMax’s debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Friday serves as a gauge of investor appetite for a sector that has consumed billions in capital and is only now starting to show signs of commercial viability.

The IPO also crystallizes a surge in wealth for Yan. Priced at the top end of the offer range, the listing valued his four-year-old firm at $6.5 billion. Shares more than doubled on its Friday debut, giving the 36-year-old chairman and chief executive officer a fortune of about $3.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

A MiniMax spokesperson declined to comment on Yan’s wealth.

The firm’s ascent was backed by billionaires drawn from China’s tech elite and Hong Kong’s financial establishment. Pacific Century Group, chaired by Richard Li, the son of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, emerged as a key investor. Another pre-IPO investor is MiHoYo, the gaming studio behind thatwas co-founded by billionaire Cai Haoyu.

They are joined by China tech giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.

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Raised in a small county in Henan province, Yan taught himself advanced calculus in high school after finding the standard curriculum too slow. Yet he did not set out to build an empire. As a doctoral student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he told friends his ambition was simply to become a Java developer at IBM Corp., targeting an annual salary of about 280,000 yuan ($40,000), according to local media.