Several Chinese financial outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, report that DeepSeek has engaged CITIC Securities as its listing coach to prepare an IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market. The plan, as described, is to kick off the IPO process before the end of the year, submit the formal application in 2026, and list on the exchange in 2027. CITIC Securities has reportedly made contact and entered the due-diligence phase, though the two sides have not yet signed a formal listing coaching agreement. As of now, the Shanghai Stock Exchange's public filing system shows no record of an application from the company.
Reported use-of-proceeds falls into three buckets: expanding compute infrastructure, stepping up spending on model research and in-house chip development, and strengthening incentives for core talent. Those three areas are also where the company has spent the most over the past year.
From first outside check to IPO prep: three months
DeepSeek went a long stretch after its founding without taking any outside funding. In June this year it closed its first external round, roughly $7.4 billion, at a post-money valuation above $50 billion. Founder Liang Wenfeng personally put in about RMB 20 billion, Tencent contributed roughly RMB 10 billion, and the CATL-affiliated group added about RMB 5 billion. The makeup of that round was unusual — the founder and strategic/industrial shareholders carried the bulk of it, with financial investors taking a back seat.
The revenue line is climbing even faster. Revenue for the first seven months of this year came in at roughly RMB 475 million, which by public estimates is about 10 times what the company made in all of 2025. The multiple looks impressive, but the absolute number looks a lot smaller next to a $50-billion-plus post-money valuation: back-of-envelope math puts the price-to-sales ratio in the triple digits. The STAR Market does leave room for unprofitable tech companies to list, but pricing the offering still requires a story institutional investors can accept — and for now, that story can only lean on non-financial metrics like compute order volume and model-call traffic.
Three months — that's the gap between the company's first outside capital and pushing its listing plan into the due-diligence stage. DeepSeek has never followed the industry's usual funding rhythm, and this is no exception.
New round reportedly targets a RMB 500 billion valuation
Running in parallel with the IPO prep is another funding round, reportedly targeting a valuation of about RMB 500 billion — roughly 50% above June's post-money valuation.
Structures for transferring existing shares have already surfaced in the primary market. Some SPV products are charging upfront fees of 6% to 15% plus a profit share of 20% to 40%, with a minimum investment of RMB 10 million. Products like these tend to cluster around companies with a clear path to listing, and once the fees stack up, an investor's actual holding cost can end up well above the headline price quoted in the primary market. The authenticity and compliance of these share allocations cannot be verified through public channels.
Several open questions
None of the reports give specific numbers for the filing window, the size of the offering, or the amount to be raised. It's also unclear whether the company would qualify under the STAR Market's fifth listing standard, or whether it has an offshore structure that would need to be unwound. Neither CITIC Securities nor DeepSeek has publicly commented.
For domestic peers, the value of this news lies mainly in the choice itself. Over the past year, several large-model companies have picked Hong Kong or the A-share market for their listings, each for reasons tied to shareholder structure and revenue profile. By choosing the STAR Market, DeepSeek is signing up for mainland regulators' disclosure standards: model training costs, compute procurement contracts, revenue recognition methods — numbers that have so far only circulated as rumor and estimates — would, for the first time, appear in a prospectus.
Sources: Reuters, Jiemian News, CocoLoop, IT Home, Sina Finance; the roughly $7.4 billion first funding round and post-money valuation above $50 billion, first-seven-months revenue of about RMB 475 million, and the new round's target valuation of about RMB 500 billion are all cross-checked against financial media's public reporting; the filing record is based on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's public query results.