DeepSeek could hit a $45B valuation from its first round of funding

DeepSeek is in the news for raising its initial funding, and in just a few weeks, its valuation has risen from $20 billion to $45 billion, Financial Times and Bloomberg report.

China’s AI lab it became popular in early 2025 after introducing a large model of the language that was trained at a fraction of the computing power and at a fraction of the cost of large US models such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It has been saving appropriate directions with the world’s best examples in fields such as philosophy and copyright while remaining open (the bibliography is freely available Hugging Face).

Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls about 90% of the company, the lab has never sought investors, the FT reports. However, in the face of rival search engine DeepSeek, Liang opted to raise funds to give employees shares in the company, sources tell the FT.

The round is said to be led by state investment company China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China wants to support domestic AI technology to overcome the problem of access to US technology, especially chips. DeepSeek is designed to use chips made by Chinese giant Huawei Technologies. This combo is considered a powerful duo for the country to develop its own AI to compete with the United States. The country’s cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also said to be in talks to participate, according to Bloomberg.

DeepSeek could not immediately be reached for comment.