DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round

Source: TechCrunch

Image Credits: CN-STR/AFP / Getty Images

Posted: 10:20 AM PDT · May 6, 2026

Valuation Surge

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

Background

The Chinese AI lab rose to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large‑language model that was trained on a fraction of the compute power and cost of the major U.S. models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Since then it has kept a reasonable pace with the world’s top models in areas such as reasoning and coding, while remaining open‑weight—its versions are freely available on Hugging Face【source】.

Founded by hedge‑fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90 % of the company, DeepSeek had not previously sought external investors. Facing competition for its researchers, Liang decided to raise funds to offer employees equity, according to the FT.

Funding Round

The round is reported to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (as noted by Bloomberg). China aims to fund homegrown AI to bypass reliance on U.S. technology, especially chips. DeepSeek’s models are optimized for chips produced by China’s hardware giant Huawei Technologies, a pairing seen as a strategic move to develop AI that can rival the United States. Cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly in talks to participate.

DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.