DeepSeek Eyes $45B Valuation in First Funding Round
SkimNews Take
The rapid increase in DeepSeek's target valuation, even before its first investment round closes, indicates a market where perceived strategic importance is outweighing traditional early-stage financial metrics.
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- DeepSeek is negotiating its first VC round, with valuation expectations jumping from $20 billion to $45 billion, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg.
- DeepSeek’s early‑2025 LLM runs on far less compute and cost than U.S. rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, yet rivals them in reasoning and coding, and its weights are publicly released on Hugging Face.
- Liang Wenfeng, the hedge‑fund billionaire who founded DeepSeek and holds roughly 90 % of the firm, is raising capital to grant employee equity as rival firms poach its talent.
- China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund leads the funding, with cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba also in talks, reflecting a push to pair Chinese‑made chips (Huawei) with domestic AI models.
- DeepSeek was not reachable for comment.
Why it matters: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek locks in a $45 billion valuation, giving investors and the Chinese chip ecosystem a massive boost while accelerating talent wars with U.S. rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
