DeepSeek could be valued at up to $45 billion from its first investment round

DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and within a few weeks, its potential valuation has risen from $20 billion to $45 billion, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported.

The Chinese AI lab rose to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that was trained on a fraction of the computing power and at a fraction of the cost of large American models such as those at OpenAI and Anthropic. Since then, I have maintained a reasonable pace with the world’s best models in areas such as reasoning and programming while maintaining open weight (versions are available for free on Hugging Face).

The Financial Times reported that the laboratory, founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, had not previously sought investors. However, in the face of competitors poaching DeepSeek researchers, Liang chose to raise money for an employee stock offering in the company, sources told the Financial Times.

The round is said to be led by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, the government’s investment vehicle, Bloomberg reported. China is seeking to fund domestic AI technology to avoid difficulty obtaining American technology, especially chips. DeepSeek is optimized to run on chips made by Chinese hardware giant Huawei Technologies. This combination is 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 reportedly in talks to participate, according to Bloomberg.

DeepSeek could not immediately be reached for comment.