DeepSeek Closes $15B Round, Double Its Original Target
2 min readDeepSeek has closed a funding round of about 100 billion yuan, roughly $15 billion, according to a Bloomberg News report on October 22. Battery giant CATL and Tencent were among the largest investors. The figure is double the 50 billion yuan the Hangzhou lab set out to raise when the round began in July, and it lands as the company prepares for a China IPO.
How the DeepSeek funding round grew
Earlier this month, AI Incider reported that DeepSeek was lining up at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, with a push toward 100 billion yuan under consideration. That ceiling is now the headline number. Reuters, which could not immediately verify Bloomberg’s figures, said the fundraising was in its final stages and that the totals could still change. DeepSeek, Tencent and CATL did not respond to requests for comment.
Until this year DeepSeek was funded almost entirely by founder Liang Wenfeng’s quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer. Its first outside round, reported around June, was far smaller. No valuation for the new round has been disclosed.
What the money is for
Reports say the capital will go toward computing infrastructure and model development as DeepSeek tries to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic, which have each raised well over $100 billion through a mix of financing structures. DeepSeek has kept shipping in the meantime: its V4.1 Flash model in September pressured rivals such as MiniMax and Z.AI, and this week it open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework it says powers V4.1 Flash at scale.
The company has also hired CITIC Securities to prepare a domestic listing, with Shanghai’s STAR Market the expected venue.
Why it matters
A $15 billion round is far larger than anything Chinese AI startups have typically raised. It shows that domestic capital, from a battery maker to a social media giant, is willing to bankroll a frontier-model race even as Beijing warns officials about an AI bubble. It also arrives two days after the US Department of Homeland Security ordered DeepSeek purged from federal civilian systems, a reminder that the company’s overseas market is narrowing while its home market deepens.
Watch for the final terms, a valuation, and the IPO filing timeline. If DeepSeek lists in Shanghai next year, it would be the first Chinese frontier lab to test public-market appetite at this scale.