DeepSeek is negotiating its first venture capital round, with its valuation jumping from $20 billion to $45 billion in a few weeks, reported by Financial Times and Bloomberg.
The Chinese AI lab gained attention in early 2025 by launching a large language model that required significantly less compute power and cost compared to major U.S. models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since kept pace with top global models in reasoning and coding while maintaining open weight (freely available on Hugging Face).
Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who holds nearly 90% of the company, the lab had not previously sought investors, according to FT. To counteract competitors luring away DeepSeek’s researchers, Liang decided to raise funds to offer employees shares, sources told FT.
The funding round is reportedly led by China’s state investment vehicle, China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, as Bloomberg notes. China aims to foster homegrown AI tech to bypass the challenges of acquiring U.S. technology, particularly chips. DeepSeek is optimized to run on chips from China’s Huawei Technologies, creating a strong partnership for developing AI to compete with the U.S. The nation’s cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly interested in participating, per Bloomberg.
DeepSeek could not be reached for comment.