Liang Wenfeng spent years saying DeepSeek did not need venture money, with the company funded largely through his quant fund High-Flyer and run more like a research lab than a conventional startup. Reuters now says that stance is shifting: a roughly 50 billion yuan round, or about $7.4 billion, is close to completion at a valuation of 350 billion to 400 billion yuan.
The unusual part is the source of the money. Liang himself is expected to contribute 20 billion yuan, almost half the round, keeping the largest single commitment in founder hands. Tencent is considering 10 billion yuan, CATL is looking at 5 billion yuan, and IDG and Monolith are also listed, while China’s national AI fund, NetEase and JD.com remain in final talks.
CATL’s presence makes sense when the financing is viewed as an infrastructure round rather than a simple software bet. DeepSeek has been moving parts of its stack from Nvidia chips to Huawei Ascend hardware and expanding data-center capacity in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. That requires engineers, servers and electricity. The open question is whether DeepSeek can accept strategic and state-linked money while preserving the cheap-model, open-release culture that made it valuable in the first place.
Sources：Reuters and Investing.com report on DeepSeek’s planned $7 billion fundraising; Reuters report on Tencent and CATL leading the round; CocoLoop