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DeepSeekHangzhou-based open-weights frontier lab; spun from quant fund High-Flyer, now reportedly raising its first external round
Funding (reported 2026)
~$7.4B / $52-59B
first external round, led by Tencent + CATL; previously self-funded
V4-Pro (Apr 2026)
1.6T / 49B active
near GPT-5.5 / Opus 4.7 at far lower API cost; 1M context
US App Store Rank (peak)
#1 free
Jan 28 2025; first Chinese consumer AI app to hit #1 in the US
NVDA Market-Cap Impact (Jan 27 2025)
-$589B / -17%
Largest single-day market-cap loss for any US-listed company in history
Total raised: Historically self-funded by High-Flyer; first external round reported 2026 · Latest valuation: $52-59B (reported, first external round)
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founder / Parent Funding | 2023-2025 | Undisclosed | - | High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management |
| First External Round (reported) | 2026 (reported) | ~$7.4B (50B yuan) target | $52-59B (reported) | TencentCATLLiang Wenfeng (~40% reported)state-linked chip fund (reported) |
| Product | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek-V4 | Open-weights MoE (V4-Pro 1.6T/49B, V4-Flash 284B/13B, 1M context) | Released (Apr 2026) |
| DeepSeek-V3 | 671B parameter MoE open-weights base model (37B active) | Released (Dec 2024) |
| DeepSeek-R1 | Open-weights reasoning model (chain-of-thought) | Released (Jan 2025) |
| DeepSeek-Coder family | Open-weights code models (1.3B to 33B) | Released |
| DeepSeek Chat | Consumer chatbot on web + iOS + Android | GA |
| DeepSeek API | Developer API at heavily discounted price-per-token | GA |
Hedge fund founded 2015 by Liang Wenfeng; banked thousands of A100s and H800s pre-export-controls; funded DeepSeek's first years entirely from its balance sheet.
Reported lead cheques in DeepSeek's first external round at a $52-59B valuation.
DeepSeek models hosted across all major Chinese clouds; Huawei Ascend 910C / inference pipeline.
DeepSeek researchers frequently co-publish with BAAI; loose alignment with PRC national AI strategy.
Liang Wenfeng spins DeepSeek out of his quant hedge fund High-Flyer in Hangzhou; uses banked A100 / H800 capacity for training
First open-weights release (7B and 67B parameter base models)
236B parameter MoE; Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) paper published
671B parameter MoE (37B active); claimed total training cost ~$5.6M / 2.78M H800 GPU-hours (figure heavily disputed)
Open-weights reasoning model competitive with OpenAI o1; chain-of-thought training pipeline published
DeepSeek app hits #1 free on US App Store; NVIDIA falls 17% / -$589B market cap in one session, the largest single-day market-cap loss in history
Liang Wenfeng among small group of CEOs meeting Xi Jinping; signals Beijing's elevation of DeepSeek as a national champion
Italy, Australia, Taiwan, US House, NY State, several US federal agencies restrict DeepSeek on government devices
V4-Pro (1.6T total / 49B active) and V4-Flash (284B / 13B), both with 1M-token context; benchmarks near GPT-5.5 / Claude Opus 4.7 at far lower API cost; optimized for Huawei Ascend chips
Reportedly raising ~$7.4B (50B yuan) at a $52-59B valuation led by Tencent and CATL, the lab's first outside capital
Chinese frontier lab funded by quantitative-trading firm High-Flyer. Open-weights releases (DeepSeek V2, V3, R1) demonstrated frontier-class capability at materially lower disclosed training cost (DeepSeek-V3 trained for roughly $5.6M on disclosed FLOPs). DeepSeek-R1 (Jan 2025) was widely cited as the inflection point in the open-versus-closed competitive map. No external funding; revenue model unclear (free hosted API plus open-weights distribution). DeepSeek was founded in 2023, is headquartered in Hangzhou, China and employs ~150 (estimated).
DeepSeek has raised Historically self-funded by High-Flyer; first external round reported 2026 in total at a $52-59B (reported, first external round) valuation, based on the funding rounds Sterling tracks.
Sterling groups DeepSeek in the AI Software sector, alongside OpenAI (private), Anthropic (private), SpaceXAI (private), Mistral AI (private), Cohere (private) and AI21 Labs (private).
If you are researching DeepSeek, also look at Alibaba (Qwen), Tencent (Hunyuan) and Baidu (Ernie). You can compare all of them side by side or browse the full AI Software sector on Sterling.
