闫俊杰 Yan JunjieYan Junjie

Born ~1989. Taught himself advanced calculus in high school after finding the standard curriculum too slow. Earned a degree in Mathematics from Southeast University (2006), then a PhD from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2015). Conducted postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University. Spent 6+ years at SenseTime, rising to deputy head of its research institute. Became captivated by OpenAI after its bots defeated elite human teams in Dota 2 (2019), prompting a career pivot from computer vision to NLP. Founded MiniMax in December 2021. The company developed Hailuo AI (video generation) and a suite of multimodal models. MiniMax IPO'd on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, making Yan a billionaire at age 36 with a net worth of $3.2B.