Who is betting on what in AI, and against whom.
DeepSeek
Open weights, efficiency, RL-first reasoning.
- HQ
- Hangzhou
- Founded
- Jul 2023
- Web
- deepseek.com
- Camps
- LLM scaling
What it does
DeepSeek was bootstrapped by the quant fund High-Flyer until June 2026, when it took its first outside money: about $7.4B at a valuation near $50B, with founder Liang Wenfeng putting in the largest check and investors buying into a partnership with no voting rights. Its R1 paper made reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards the standard recipe for reasoning models.
Camp membership over time
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dates not recordedScale next-token predictionSources DeepSeek takes outside money for the first time at a $50 billion valuation The Decoder 2026-06-16
Capital
| Amount | Kind | Valuation | Date | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $7.40B | first external round | $50B reported | Jun 2026 | Liang Wenfeng, Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase, IDG Capital, National AI Industry Investment Fund Reported at 338-400B yuan valuation; LP structure with five-year lock-up. | The Decoder, Forbes |