Aug 26 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup MiniMax on Wednesday posted a nearly four-fold jump in first-half revenue as demand for its low-cost models and AI platform accelerated, with the company continuing to target cheaper ways to deploy AI at scale.
Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose 283.1% from a year earlier to $116.6 million, reflecting surging demand for cheaper, open-source-based models from Chinese providers such as MiniMax and DeepSeek, which position themselves as lower-cost alternatives to proprietary U.S. systems.
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MiniMax said it will keep pushing to extend the "performance-cost frontier," first getting performance to a level that can handle complex real-world tasks and then improving efficiency to allow capabilities to be rolled out more widely and affordably.
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Revenue from its Open Platform and other AI-based enterprise services surged 703.1% to $73.9 million as paying users grew.
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The segment contributed 63.4% of the startup's total revenue during the period, up from 30.3% a year earlier.
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Revenue from its AI-native products rose 100.9% to $42.6 million.
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MiniMax remains a loss-making company, though its half-year loss attributable narrowed to $358 million from $402.2 million last year.
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MiniMax was one of the "AI tigers" to go public this year, raising HK$4.82 billion ($614.86 million) in its Hong Kong listing before its stock nearly doubled on its first trading day.
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The Chinese tech firm also raised HK$16.04 billion in fresh capital through a share sale and a bond issue last month to fund growth in its AI business.
($1 = 7.8392 Hong Kong dollars)
Reporting by Sneha Kumar and Shruti Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda
Source: Reuters