DeepSeek valuation rockets to $45B as China's Big Fund leads first fundraising round

DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round | TechCrunch

DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital and, in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported. The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since kept reasonable pace with the top models in the world in areas like reasoning and coding while remaining open weight (versions are freely available on Hugging Face). Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, the lab has not previously sought out investors, the FT reports. However, faced with competitors poaching DeepSeek's researchers, Liang opted to raise funds in order to offer employees shares in the company, sources tell the FT. The round is said to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China is seeking to fund homegrown AI technology to sidestep the difficulty of obtaining U.S. technology, particularly chips. DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips made by China's hardware giant Huawei Technologies. That combo is considered a powerful duo for the nation to develop its own AI to rival the United States. The country's cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly in talks to participate, per Bloomberg. DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.

DeepSeek nears $45bn valuation as China's 'Big Fund' leads investment talks

China's biggest state-backed semiconductor investment vehicle is in talks to lead the financing of DeepSeek's first fundraising that could value the frontier AI lab at about $45bn. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, typically referred to as the "Big Fund", is seeking to lead the investment into DeepSeek, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. Other investors still in talks for a stake include Chinese tech giant Tencent, although the final line-up has not yet been finalised. DeepSeek shot to prominence in January 2025 following the release of R1, a powerful open-source large language model, which it said was trained on a fraction of the computing power of models developed by American rivals such as OpenAI. The valuation of DeepSeek has increased significantly from $20bn when it started the fundraising talks only weeks ago, as investors strive to bet on the lab's potential despite its lack of focus on commercialisation. Liang Wenfeng, the billionaire founder of the Hangzhou-based start-up, could also invest personally in this round, two of the people said. He controls 89.5 per cent of DeepSeek through personal holdings and affiliated groups, according to company filings. Backing from China's most strategic government fund in semiconductors would reinforce DeepSeek's position as a leader in the country's frontier AI model development, as well as promote a Chinese ecosystem comprising domestic models, software and chips. China has launched three phases of the state-backed "Big Fund" to aid President Xi Jinping's self-sufficiency drive in the face of US efforts to restrict the country's access to technology such as advanced semiconductor production equipment. The fund assembled $47bn from the finance ministry, local government and state-owned banks in its third round of funding in 2024, with a mandate to invest in semiconductor equipment and materials. It has not publicly backed any of China's other LLM players. The Big Fund has bankrolled key companies in China's semiconductor industry including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, the country's largest and most advanced foundry, as well as Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp., China's leading memory chipmaker. DeepSeek said in its latest V4 model launch that it had been optimised to run inference -- the computation that LLMs use to generate responses -- on Huawei's Ascend 950PR chips. Huawei's AI chip sales have surged this year as it overtook Nvidia in China, the world's largest AI chip supplier, whose advanced products are still banned from entering the country, the FT reported last week. Still, the overall amount of AI chips that China produces is only a fraction of that from the US and these processors are at least two generations behind. To catch up, Beijing is counting on its tech companies -- from chipmakers to model builders -- to work closely together. The aim is to develop an ecosystem that could sustain China's competitiveness in AI despite US export controls tightening. Such an ecosystem could pose a danger to US dominance globally, according to Nvidia chief Jensen Huang. "The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation," he said in a recent interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. It could lead to a scenario where "AI models around the world are developed and they run best on non-American hardware", he added. Since it came to global attention last year DeepSeek has focused on training frontier AI models, rather than developing a commercial business selling AI to companies or growing its consumer AI chatbot. DeepSeek's coding capability is among the best in China, where peers such as Zhipu and Moonshot expect revenues to keep surging, according to one of the people considering an investment. Hong Kong-listed Zhipu has a market value of $52bn. Liang initially wanted to raise a nominal sum to assign a value to DeepSeek's options in a bid to stop his researchers being poached by competitors offering huge packages, the FT reported last month. Stock options typically make up most of an AI researcher's remuneration. Now that DeepSeek's valuation has risen significantly, Liang might consider raising more money to boost a war chest for future investment in computing capacity, the person said. DeepSeek, the Big Fund and Tencent did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Additional reporting by Arjun Neil Alim in Hong Kong

DeepSeek's $45bn valuation is also Beijing's strategic statement

What started in mid-April as a $300m raise at a $10bn valuation, with Alibaba and Tencent talking, is now an FT-reported deal at $45bn led by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. The strategic logic has changed substantially. There is, in venture-capital pricing, a particular kind of ascent that does not normally happen to a company that has spent its entire existence refusing outside money. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing a Financial Times scoop, that China's main state-backed semiconductor investment vehicle is now in talks to lead DeepSeek's first external funding round at a valuation of approximately $45bn. The valuation is more than double the figure that was being discussed only two weeks ago. The trajectory, in itself, is striking. The composition of the lead investor is more so. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known across the industry as the "Big Fund", is the central state vehicle through which Beijing has financed China's semiconductor self-sufficiency push since 2014. I ts three successive phases have, between them, deployed more than $50bn into Chinese chip-design, fabrication, packaging, and equipment companies. Until Wednesday's reporting, the fund's mandate was overwhelmingly focused on the silicon side of the AI stack, fabs, foundries, memory producers, and EDA tooling. A direct lead investment in a frontier-AI model lab would be, by some distance, the largest extension of the fund's mandate to date. It also tells you what Beijing has decided about the strategic relationship between AI capability and chip capability. TNW has tracked the wider US-China chip-export-control dynamic for several years, and the through-line has been consistent: the US has used semiconductor export controls to limit China's access to leading-edge AI compute, and China has been searching for a response strategy that recovers parity. The Big Fund leading a DeepSeek round is, in that frame, the recognition that the response strategy now runs through model capability rather than purely through chip capability. If China cannot acquire Nvidia's leading-edge GPUs at the volume required, it will, on this evidence, finance the model labs that have demonstrated they can produce frontier results without them. DeepSeek's commercial story is by now familiar. The company was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old computer scientist and co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management. Until April 2026, DeepSeek had been funded entirely from High-Flyer's balance sheet, with no external venture capital and no public communication of revenue. South China Morning Post asked the obvious question last month: why is a company that does not appear to need cash now raising it? The answer, on the available reporting, has two parts. The first is operational. DeepSeek-R1, the reasoning model launched in January 2025 that triggered the dramatic equity-market reaction in US technology stocks at the time, was trained for a reported $6m, an order of magnitude less than its US peers. DeepSeek V4, the company's trillion-parameter flagship, launched on 24 April 2026, the same week that funding negotiations became public. Even with High-Flyer's balance sheet, training and serving frontier models at the scale DeepSeek now operates is not an indefinitely sustainable internal-funding proposition. The second is strategic. Yicai Global reported that Liang himself injected fresh personal capital in April, lifting DeepSeek's registered capital by 50 per cent. His personal shareholding rose from approximately 1 per cent to 34 per cent, with his total combined direct and indirect ownership now around 84 per cent. The cap-table reorganisation appears to have been deliberately staged ahead of accepting outside capital, both to consolidate founder control and to provide a clean structure for the institutional investors now joining. The pricing trajectory is worth setting out in order. DeepSeek had quietly opened its first round at a $10bn valuation, targeting roughly $300m. By 22 April, when Bloomberg confirmed Tencent and Alibaba were in negotiations to participate, the valuation had risen above $20bn. By Wednesday's FT report, with the Big Fund engaged as potential lead, the figure stood at $45bn, more than four times the original opening mark. Three things have moved that price. The first is investor demand: each new institutional name brought into the round increased the implied valuation that the next investor had to clear. The second is the strategic premium attached to the Big Fund's involvement specifically, once a state vehicle of this size signals interest, foreign and private investors recalibrate. The third is the wider Chinese AI-funding context, which has tightened markedly in the same window. We wrote earlier this year on Tencent's ClawPro launch and the parallel investments by Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in their respective enterprise AI platforms; Alibaba's AI cloud share is now 35.8 per cent of the Chinese market, Tencent's 2025 AI spend was ¥18bn with that figure planned to double in 2026, and the broader competitive intensity inside Chinese AI has produced an environment in which a frontier-capability model lab is now treated as a strategic asset rather than a normal venture investment. A Big Fund-led round would mark a structural shift for DeepSeek. Chinese state-backed investors usually bring more than capital: access to state-aligned customers, regulatory protection, and a signal that the company is now considered strategically important. In DeepSeek's case, that could mean closer links to central-government AI procurement and state-owned-enterprise demand. The trade-off is political alignment. A state-backed lead investor may come with expectations around Chinese AI safety rules, content controls, data localisation, and preference for domestic strategic customers. It could also raise questions about whether DeepSeek's unusually open release strategy can continue unchanged. Neither DeepSeek, the Big Fund, Tencent, nor Alibaba has publicly commented, and the round has not closed. The wider context is the global AI infrastructure race. As Western governments tighten restrictions around Chinese access to chips and critical technology, Beijing appears to be tightening the financial perimeter around its leading AI companies. The potential investment suggests DeepSeek is moving from self-funded outlier to state-backed national champion. Three things now matter. First, whether Tencent and Alibaba stay in the round at the reported $45bn valuation. Second, whether DeepSeek keeps releasing model weights and technical reports with the same openness. Third, how the Big Fund's stake is structured, especially whether it includes strategic governance rights. On the available reporting, this is the clearest sign yet that Beijing has chosen DeepSeek as one of its central bets in frontier AI. The deal is not closed, but the direction is clear: DeepSeek's next chapter is likely to be less independent, more strategically aligned, and far more valuable than it was only weeks ago.

DeepSeek could be valued at up to $50 billion in first fundraising: Sources

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek is seeking a massive valuation of up to fifty billion dollars in its first funding drive. The company aims to raise three to four billion dollars. This move comes as DeepSeek faces stiff competition from rivals. The national AI fund and tech giant Tencent are reportedly in talks to invest. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek could be valued at up to $50 billion in its maiden fundraising drive, three sources said, as the large language model builder seeks to reverse its years-long strategy of rejecting outside funding. China's 60-billion-yuan ($8.8 billion) national artificial intelligence fund, founded in January last year, is in talks to be a lead investor in DeepSeek's fundraising, said one of the sources familiar with the matter. The startup could raise $3 billion to $4 billion from the funding round to fuel ⁠its computing ⁠capabilities and improve employee benefits, said separate sources with knowledge of the matter. Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has also been in talks to invest in DeepSeek, said the sources, who all declined to be named as the information is confidential. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, which is the main banker of the national AI fund, declined to comment. Tencent also declined to comment. The Financial Times first reported on Wednesday, citing sources, that China Integrated Circuit ⁠Industry Investment Fund is in talks to lead DeepSeek's first fundraising that could value the frontier AI lab at about $45 billion. LOSING GROUND TO RIVALS The maiden fundraising comes at a time when ⁠DeepSeek is losing ground to domestic competitors with deep pockets from tech giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba to upstarts like MiniMax and Moonshot AI that have raised billions from either private or public markets. DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng, who sources said is directly involved in the fundraising talks, has for years stood out in China's AI industry for preferring to fund and operate the company like a research laboratory, with the budget coming from his quant hedge fund High-Flyer, rather than a Chinese tech conglomerate or an initial public offering. Liang could not be reached for comment. Some of DeepSeek's rivals have poached DeepSeek researchers, such as Luo Fuli, who left the startup last year to lead Xiaomi's AI model team MiMo. The fast-moving AI industry has also largely moved ⁠on from and recreated the low-cost, highly efficient open-source chatbot models that fueled DeepSeek's globally viral breakthrough moment early last year. The focus has shifted to agents that can do far more complex tasks with much less human intervention than chatbots, while requiring a lot more computing power to run. DeepSeek claimed last month that its next-generation, agent-suited V4 model "redefined the state-of-the-art" for open-source models but third-party evaluations suggested it lagged behind the best models from some U.S. and Chinese competitors. Tellingly, V4's release did not repeat the global tech share selloff triggered last year by its predecessors V3 and R1. ($1 = 6.8110 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Reuters Staff; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee, Louise Heavens and Elaine Hardcastle)

DeepSeek value could be up to $50 billion in first fundraising, sources

STORY: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek could be valued at as much as $50 billion in its opening fundraising drive. That's according to three sources. The large language model builder aims to reverse its years-long strategy of rejecting outside funding. In talks to be the lead investor is China's $8.8 billion national AI fund, said one of the sources familiar with the matter. Separate sources said the start-up could raise $3 to $4 billion from the funding round to fuel its computing capabilities and improve employee benefits. The sources added Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has also been in talks to invest in the startup. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, which is the main banker of the national AI fund, and Tencent both declined to comment. The fundraising comes at a time when DeepSeek is losing ground to domestic competitors that have raised billions from either private or public markets.