Yan Junjie (; born 1989) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) company, MiniMax Group.
Yan was born in 1989 in Henan province and grew up in a small county. He taught himself advanced calculus in high school after finding the standard curriculum too slow.
He attended Southeast University graduating in 2006 with a degree in mathematics. He obtained a PhD from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. During his time as a doctoral student, Yan told friends his ambition was simply to become a Java developer at IBM targeting an annual salary of about 280,000 yuan ($40,000).
Yan then became a postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University Computer Science Department with a focus on deep learning and computer vision.
In 2015, Yan began his career at SenseTime as an intern where he eventually rose to the position of vice president.
In 2021, Yan left his job to found MiniMax Group. The name came from the Minimax algorithm.
In January 2026, Yan met Premier Li Qiang becoming the second representative from a foundational AI model developer to meet with the national leader after Liang Wenfeng.
Yan is a big enthusiast of the video game Dota 2. He goes by the alias "IO", a pun on technical Input/output and a nod to the Dota wisp hero.
Due to his heavy interest in gaming, Yan has developed a bond with Cai Haoyu, co-founder and CEO of miHoYo whose team of young engineers are obsessed with using AI to revolutionize video gaming. miHoYo was one of the early backers of Minimax Group.
In 2019 he started tracking OpenAI after seeing its bots defeat the world best players in the game. This played a huge role in prompting a career move from computer vision to natural language processing.
In January 2026, Yan became a billionaire when Minimax Group held its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. His net worth was estimated to be $3.5 billion.