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DeepSeek in Talks to Raise First Venture Round at $45 Billion Valuation
DeepSeek is negotiating its first venture capital fundraising round with a potential valuation that has risen from $20 billion to $45 billion in recent weeks. The Chinese artificial intelligence laboratory gained attention in early 2025 after releasing a large language model trained using significantly less compute power and at lower cost than leading U.S. models.
May 6, 1:20 PM·1m read3 sources
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DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital with a potential valuation that has increased from $20 billion to $45 billion in just a few weeks, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported on May 6, 2026. The Chinese AI laboratory 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 leading U.S. models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
It has since maintained competitive performance with top global models in reasoning and coding capabilities while releasing open-weight versions that are freely available on Hugging Face. The company was founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90 percent of the lab.
It had not previously sought outside investors. Faced with competitors recruiting its researchers, the company decided to raise funds to provide employees with equity ownership, according to reports.
The investment round is expected to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. Tencent and Alibaba are also in discussions to participate. China is working to support homegrown artificial intelligence technology to reduce reliance on U.S. components, particularly advanced chips.
DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips produced by Huawei Technologies. The combination is viewed as a significant pairing for developing domestic AI systems capable of competing with those from the United States. DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.
