According to two sources cited by The Information, DeepSeek has recently completed its first-ever external funding round since its founding, raising over 50 billion yuan (approximately US$7.4 billion). This marks the largest single-round financing record in China’s AI industry to date, and the post-investment valuation has surpassed US$50 billion (approximately 338 billion yuan). The funding round employed a highly unconventional deal structure: aside from the National AI Industry Investment Fund, all external investors’ capital must be injected into a limited partnership managed by founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, rather than being directly invested in DeepSeek itself. Investors are subject to a five-year lock-up period and hold no voting rights. Liang Wenfeng himself contributed 20 billion yuan in this round; Tencent plans to invest 10 billion yuan, and CATL plans to invest 5 billion yuan, making them the largest external investors. JD.com, NetEase, IDG, and others also participated, with the total number of external investors being fewer than ten. DeepSeek declined to comment.
This funding round marks the first time DeepSeek has opened up to external capital since its founding three years ago; previously, the company’s funding came from Liang Wenfeng’s quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer. Liang Wenfeng had previously stated publicly that the company would „not raise funds, not go public, and not commercialize." This shift is driven by multiple pressures: major tech companies are aggressively poaching core research talent; migrating from NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem to Huawei’s Ascend CANN architecture has pushed a single training run’s cost to over US$500 million; and the overall competitive intensity has increased dramatically. The unique limited partnership structure allows Liang Wenfeng to introduce external capital while still controlling over 80% of DeepSeek’s equity through direct and indirect means, and imposing lock-up and no-voting-rights restrictions on investors, thereby completing the capital deployment while maintaining absolute control over the technology roadmap and company direction.