Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first venture capital round at a valuation that has climbed from $20 billion to $45 billion in weeks, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. The round is expected to be led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, with cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba also reportedly in discussions to participate.
Founded by hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, DeepSeek rose to global prominence in early 2025 after releasing a large language model that matched leading U.S. models at a fraction of the compute cost. The lab has remained open-weight and continued closing the gap with frontier models in reasoning and coding.
Liang opted to seek outside investment primarily to offer equity to employees amid intensifying researcher poaching by competitors. The state-backed funding underscores China’s strategic push to develop sovereign AI infrastructure built around domestic chips from Huawei.