(Yicai) July 10 -- MiniMax Group’s shares tumbled for a second day in a row after the Chinese artificial intelligence startup unveiled plans to raise HKD16 billion (USD2 billion) by selling new shares and convertible bonds and the initial lock-up period following its January stock market listing expired.

MiniMax [HKG: 0100] closed 9.8 percent lower at HKD268.60 (USD32.30) per share in Hong Kong today. The stock plunged 18 percent yesterday following the expiration of the six-month lock-up period that had restricted cornerstone and pre-initial public offering investors from disposing of their stakes, even though several anchor investors publicly pledged to retain them.

Today the Shanghai-based company, which develops multimodal AI models, revealed that it has signed an agreement to issue new shares at HKD268 each, which is expected to generate net proceeds of around HKD9.5 billion (USD1.2 billion).

It will also sell HKD6.5 billion of convertible bonds, with an initial conversion price of HKD335 per Class A share, representing a 12.6 percent premium on yesterday’s closing price of HKD297.40.

Founder and Chief Executive Yan Junjie also announced today that over the next four years he will dedicate 4 percent of his personal stake in the business to reward employees who continue contributing to the firm’s long-term development. Additionally, he pledged to set aside another 1 percent for a special fund dedicated to supporting open-source communities.

Yan also said he will forgo all compensation from MiniMax from today until artificial general intelligence -- AI capable of matching or surpassing human cognitive abilities across most tasks -- is achieved.

“From the financing perspective, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta continuously launching new large language models, China's major LLM developers are also upping investment, prompting listed companies to actively raise funds to support new model development," Shen Meng, a director at Xiangsong Capital, told Yicai.

MiniMax said 80 percent of the net proceeds will be used to beef up AI infrastructure and model research and development, about 10 percent will fund the global commercialization and development of its harness products, which integrate AI models with external tools to automate complex tasks, and the rest go to working capital and general corporate purposes.

The company's global customer base continues to expand, with about 200,000 enterprise customers and developers at the end of last year and more than one million as of late June, it said.

Based on information obtained by Yicai from MiniMax, the fundraising attracted multiple international sovereign wealth funds, long-term institutional investors, leading Chinese investment institutions, and multi-strategy funds from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and the United States. More than 20 long-term and sovereign funds, along with several pre-IPO and cornerstone investors, increased their stakes through the deal.

Editor: Emmi Laine