DeepSeek raises first venture round with valuation soaring to $45 billion

DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, with valuation climbing from $20 billion to $45 billion in recent weeks. The round is led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, with Tencent and Alibaba also reportedly participating.

The Chinese AI lab gained prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model trained on a fraction of the compute power and cost of U.S. models from OpenAI and Anthropic, while remaining open weight (versions freely available on Hugging Face). It has kept reasonable pace with top models in reasoning and coding.

Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, DeepSeek had not previously sought investors. The funding round was motivated by competition poaching the lab's researchers, prompting founder Liang to offer employees company shares. DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips made by Huawei Technologies.