DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital and has seen its potential valuation jump from $20 billion to $45 billion in a matter of weeks. financial Times And bloomberg Informed.
Chinese AI Lab came to prominence in early 2025 Launching a large language model that trained at a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of larger US models like OpenAI and Anthropic. It has been kept since then proper speed Stay open with the world’s top models in fields like logic and coding (versions are freely available). hugging face).
Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls about 90% of the company, the lab did not seek investors at first, FT report. However, sources told the FT that facing DeepSeek’s researchers being poached by competitors, Liang opted to raise funds by offering stakes in the company to employees.
The round is led by state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China wants to finance domestic AI technology to overcome the difficulty of obtaining American technology, especially chips. DeepSeek is optimized to run on chips made by Chinese 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, according to Bloomberg.
DeepSeek could not immediately be reached for comment.
