In June 2026, the start-up completed its first external funding round and now is stepping up its fundraising efforts to finance infrastructure, chips and research ahead of a possible listing in Shanghai
DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up that challenged OpenAI and other Western leaders with high-performance, low-cost open-source models (see here a previous post by BeBeez) is mulling for securing up to 50 billion yuan (7.4 billion US Dollars) on the ground of a pre-money value in the region of 500 billion yuan (74 billion US Dollars) ahead of launching an ipo on Shanghai STAR, Reuters said.
DeepSeek will increase its valuation by over 40% from June 2026 when it raised 7.4 billion US dollars for a post-money value in the region of 52 billion US dollars. Even though the firm didn’t disclose the details of that round, the listed companies which took part in it submitted regulatory filings.
Reuters also reported that the Chinese suitcase manufacturer Anhui Korrun said that fund in which he invested poured 2.9 billion yuan for an indirect 0.8265% stake in DeepSeek that leads to 350.88 billion yuan (51.82 billion US Dollars) value. Jiuan Medical filed a statement pointing out that its Hong Kong subsidiary acquired an indirect 0.21% stake in the AI scale up for 750 million yuan that a Shixiang Capital’s vehicle paid.
The first funding round marked a turning point for the company that Liang Wenfeng founded in 2023. Until then, the entrepreneur financed DeepSeek’s development with the resources of his own quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer. Market rumours say that Liang poured a further 20 billion yuan in this last round, whilst Tencent Holdings and battery giant CATL contributed with 10 billion and 5 billion yuan. The company also attracted the resources of China’s national artificial intelligence fund, video game developer NetEase, e-commerce giant JD.com, and investment firms IDG Capital, Loyal Valley Capital, Monolith Management and Shixiang Capital.
The new funding will support the acceleration of investments in computing capacity, the construction of in-house data centres and the development of chips for AI inference. Wall Street Journal says that DeepSeek also plans to double its workforce in the coming months to support the development of the next generation of its language models and intelligent agents.
