Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has reportedly raised more than $7.4 billion (over 50 billion yuan) in a new funding round, pushing its valuation above $50 billion and making it one of China’s most valuable AI companies.
According to reports from The Information and The Wall Street Journal, DeepSeek Founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng contributed around $3 billion to the funding round. Several investors also participated through a limited partnership managed by Wenfeng. Earlier reports had suggested that Chinese technology giant Tencent was considering an investment of nearly $1.5 billion in the company.
DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, gained global attention in early 2025 after releasing its open-source reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1. The model drew comparisons with OpenAI’s advanced reasoning systems while requiring significantly less computing power. The launch sparked concerns across the technology industry and briefly triggered a major sell-off in AI chip stocks including shares of NVIDIA.
The company has since continued expanding its AI capabilities. In April, DeepSeek launched DeepSeek-V4-Pro, a large language model with 1.6 trillion parameters. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture activating only a portion of its parameters when responding to queries helping reduce computing costs while maintaining performance.
The company has also focused on improving efficiency. It claims its latest model can process much larger prompts while using significantly less memory than previous versions, lowering the cost of running AI applications.
DeepSeek’s growing influence has attracted attention from global technology companies. Reports suggest that Microsoft is exploring the use of a customised version of DeepSeek’s AI models for its enterprise AI offerings.
The company is reportedly evaluating a fine-tuned DeepSeek model as a lower-cost alternative to some of the AI systems currently provided by OpenAI and Anthropic.
The funding comes at a time when competition in the global AI industry is intensifying, with Chinese firms increasingly challenging the dominance of American AI companies. DeepSeek’s latest funding round is expected to support further research, model development, and expansion of its AI ecosystem as it looks to strengthen its position in the rapidly evolving AI market.
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