Year of the Horse: Zhipu and MiniMax Up More Than 500% Since IPO

For China's artificial intelligence market, the Year of the Horse has been more than symbolic: it is the moment capital fully bought into the idea that domestic developers of large language models can compete with global leaders. On the first trading day of the lunar new year, 20 February, shares of Zhipu and MiniMax on the Hong Kong exchange staged a rally that swept through every financial feed: Zhipu closed at 725 HKD, up 42.72% on the session, while MiniMax gained more than 14% to reach 970 HKD per share. The two companies' combined market capitalization exceeded 300 billion HKD, more than JD.com, one of China's largest internet retailers, which has operated for more than twenty years.

These figures need context. Both companies went public only in January 2026: Zhipu listed on 8 January at an offer price of 116.2 HKD, and MiniMax followed the next day at 165 HKD. The market greeted them with enthusiasm from the start: Zhipu's public offering was oversubscribed 1,160 times, and MiniMax soared more than 109% on its very first day of trading. But what happened over the following six weeks went beyond any scenario: since the IPO, shares of both companies have risen by more than 500%.

Specific technology events catalyzed the February acceleration. Early in the month, word began circulating in overseas AI communities about an anonymous model called Pony Alpha, which observers linked to an upcoming Zhipu release. On 12 February, the company officially opened access to GLM-5, the new flagship of its series, and at the same time announced a price increase of at least 30% for its GLM Coding Plan subscription.

The market read this not as greed but as a signal of confidence: the company is raising prices because the product can support it. On the next trading day, the stock rose another 20.65%.

MiniMax got a similar boost from its text model MiniMax M2.5: the 13 February release pushed the quotes up again, and over ten trading days the company's shares gained about 90%.

For the industry, this episode means more than the stock market success of two startups. Zhipu grew out of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory at Tsinghua University, founded back in 1996; its key scientist Tang Jie took part in building the Chinese multimodal model "Wu Dao 2.0" with a trillion parameters. MiniMax was founded in 2022 by Yan Junjie, a former vice president of SenseTime, who left to start his own project just before his previous company's IPO. Both projects embody the "scientist-entrepreneur" model, which China's venture ecosystem has learned to value especially highly in foundational AI.

The financial results for early investors are as impressive as the share price moves. The CASSTAR fund invested 40 million yuan in Zhipu back in 2019, at a company valuation of 375 million yuan. Today its stake is worth more than 4.

3 billion HKD, a hundredfold return in absolute terms. Early backers of MiniMax, including Hillhouse, IDG, Sequoia, Gaorong and others, are also booking triple-digit returns on paper. Neither company has yet emerged from its lock-up period, so the real "harvest" for institutional investors still lies ahead.

The internal story is notable too: under employee equity participation programs, Zhipu's employees own 51.2% of the shares, while at MiniMax equity ownership is practically universal. At current prices, a significant share of the teams at both companies has already reached financial independence.

What is happening on the public market runs alongside venture activity. In late December 2025, Moonshot AI closed a $500 million Series C at a $4.3 billion valuation. In January 2026, StepFun announced it had raised over 50 billion yuan in a Series B+. According to available information, Moonshot AI is close to closing a new round of more than $700 million at a valuation above $10 billion. China's large language model market has entered a phase in which investors are broadly revising the fair value of assets upward.

The question, however, is not whether the growth will continue, but how long it will last. As competition among Chinese AI companies intensifies and global players have no intention of giving up ground, capital will inevitably start to concentrate around two or three leaders. The Year of the Horse has fired the starting gun in this race, but the finish line is still very far away.