DeepSeek, one of China's leading artificial intelligence laboratories, is in talks to conduct its first venture capital funding round. According to Financial Times and Bloomberg, the company's market valuation has surged from $20 billion to $45 billion in just a few weeks. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reporting .
DeepSeek gained significant fame in early 2025 by introducing a large language model trained with significantly fewer resources and capital compared to US giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. The company provides its models in open-source format via the Hugging Face platform, competing with the world's most advanced technologies in reasoning and programming.
Company founder, billionaire Liang Wenfeng, has not previously sought external investment. However, due to increased poaching of employees by competitors, he decided to raise funds to offer equity stakes to staff. This investment round is expected to be led by a Chinese state-backed investment fund.
China is supporting local AI solutions to overcome shortages of US technologies, particularly chips. DeepSeek models are optimized to run on Huawei chips, a tandem that plays a crucial role in ensuring China's technological independence. It is also reported that Tencent and Alibaba may participate in this investment process.
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