capital · May 16, 2026

DeepSeek Raises $7.35 Billion in First Funding Round Led by China's Big Fund

Aakash Gupta posted on May 9, 2026, that DeepSeek raised $7.35 billion at a $50 billion valuation in its first funding round. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund led the round with participation from Tencent, Hillhouse, and Alibaba. Liang Wenfeng consolidated his ownership to 84 percent before the round and personally wrote the largest individual check. DeepSeek V4 launched on April 24, 2026, as a trillion-parameter open-source model after earlier models like R1 trained for $6 million.