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Chinese artificial intelligence startups are trying to enter the US market and achieve rapid revenue growth. Shanghai-based MiniMax has made significant commercial progress in the past year. According to media reports, MiniMax’s revenue this year is expected to reach around $70 million. This is a high forecast for AI startups that have struggled with commercialization. According to insiders, most of the revenue comes from MiniMax’s virtual chatbot application Talkie, which is popular among American teenagers. Sensor Tower monitoring shows that since its release, Talkie has consistently ranked among the top three globally in downloads for companion AI applications.
According to two informed sources, MiniMax’s domestic version Talkie ‘Xingye’ has been struggling to make a profit. Most of MiniMax’s sales come from advertising on Talkie, but it also offers premium subscription services that allow users to have longer conversations with virtual characters. Due to fluctuations in demand, MiniMax’s revenue forecast may change. In a financing round announced by MiniMax in March, the company was valued at $25 billion and ultimately raised $600 million.
The success of Talkie has sparked a wave of role-playing AI companion applications in China. However, whether it is ByteDance’s “Cat Box” or the once popular “Nie Ta” in the secondary community, no other app has been able to replicate Talkie’s global growth rate. The difficulty of replicating Talkie’s success has also led MiniMax into a deadlock when trying to expand its business using the same methodology. Currently, MiniMax is valued at over 20 billion yuan – in order to strengthen its business barriers and risk resistance capabilities, it needs more Talkies. Several industry insiders have indicated that whether it is the domestically promoted Xingye or productivity tool “Hailuo AI,” MiniMax wants to replicate the same strategy: incorporating companionship and social elements. However, even the creator of Talkie failed to recreate another successful app like Talkie.
Meanwhile, Chinese AI companies are attempting to avoid issues faced by TiKToK in the United States by establishing entities overseas such as Singapore, Hong Kong or America itself. These companies run overseas applications on servers outside China; for example, MiniMax uses an AWS data center abroad for running inference on its Talkie application.