Liang Wenfeng tells prospective investors the Hangzhou lab will prioritise frontier research over revenue, in its first-ever external raise.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has told prospective investors in the company’s first outside funding round that the lab intends to pursue artificial general intelligence as a primary goal, and will keep releasing open-source models rather than chase short-term commercialisation.
Bloomberg reported the messaging on Friday, in coverage of an ongoing 70 billion yuan (roughly $10bn) raise.
That figure represents the valuation DeepSeek is reportedly targeting, rather than the cheque size. The startup is seeking at least $300m in external capital in this round, according to. The Information has separately written that the longer-term ambition could reach $7bn or more as the lab moves toward recurring revenue.
The current round is the first time Liang has accepted outside money.
That fact is most of the news. DeepSeek had until now been funded entirely out of High-Flyer Quant, the quantitative trading firm Liang founded and which still effectively backs the lab. Liang has previously framed the absence of outside investors as a deliberate insulation from product-roadmap pressure.
The shift this round represents is partly a function of scale: training runs at the size DeepSeek now operates at have moved beyond what even a profitable hedge fund can self-finance.
The AGI framing is also a marker of where the company places itself. DeepSeek released its V4-Pro and V4-Flash models in April, a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts system and a smaller 284-billion-parameter variant, both released open-source under permissive licensing.
The V4 family is optimised to run on Huawei Ascend and Cambricon silicon as well as Nvidia, which is a deliberate signal to a domestic Chinese market increasingly cut off from the highest-end US accelerators.
The pitch to investors, on Bloomberg’s reading, leans heavily on the research-first identity that produced January 2025’s R1 model. R1’s release erased roughly $600bn from Nvidia’s market capitalisation in a single trading session, on the view that frontier reasoning models could be trained for a fraction of what US labs were spending.
Whether that pricing claim fully held up under scrutiny became a debate of its own, but the strategic point landed: a Chinese lab could keep pace at the frontier and do it in the open.
The terms not yet public are the ones that matter most. Investor identities have not been confirmed; the valuation has not been formally announced by the company; the close date has not been set.
DeepSeek has historically declined to engage with press inquiries, and the lab did not provide on-the-record comment for Bloomberg’s report. A raise of this size, at this valuation, with this stated goal, would also draw attention from Chinese regulators, who have spent the last two years working out what state oversight of foundation-model developers should look like.
What Liang has now committed to publicly is a direction of travel: open-source, frontier-oriented, AGI as the framing rather than enterprise revenue. The round, when it closes, will be the first time outside capital has agreed to those terms.
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