Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is planning to launch a fresh fundraising round at a valuation of roughly 500 billion yuan, or about 74 billion dollars, ahead of a potential mainland initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan comes just weeks after the Hangzhou based company raised approximately 7.4 billion dollars in June at a post money valuation of around 450 billion yuan, in what was its first ever external fundraising round.
DeepSeek is looking to raise as much as 50 billion yuan in the new funding round, with the company also having started early deliberations on a potential listing on Shanghai’s Nasdaq style STAR Market. The company has set an internal target of completing an IPO filing before the end of this year, with a listing potentially following in 2027, though people familiar with the plans cautioned that both the fundraising and IPO timeline remain at an early stage and could still change.
The back to back fundraising rounds reflect strong investor appetite for one of China’s most closely watched AI companies, but also point to the rising costs of remaining competitive in artificial intelligence, an industry that demands large amounts of computing power, data centre capacity, and specialised engineering talent. Soon after closing its June funding round, DeepSeek said it planned to double staff across several departments, including data centres and AI agent development, initiatives that will require substantial capital expenditure to execute. The company has also been quietly expanding its hiring of chip design engineers as part of an effort to develop its own AI inference chip, reducing its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei hardware for training and running its models.
In the June round, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng personally committed 20 billion yuan, while Tencent Holdings and battery manufacturer CATL contributed 10 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan respectively to become the company’s largest external shareholders. Other investors in that round included China’s national AI fund, gaming company NetEase, e-commerce giant JD.com, and several investment firms, with the participation of the state backed AI fund underscoring DeepSeek’s strategic importance to Beijing’s broader push to build domestic AI champions and reduce reliance on foreign technology. Liang retains tight control over the company through a structure in which outside investor capital carries no voting rights and is subject to a five year lock up, with China’s state AI investment fund reportedly the only external party holding a board vote.
DeepSeek shook global technology markets last year after releasing AI models that appeared to match leading American systems while requiring significantly lower training and operating costs, briefly wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off the value of AI linked US stocks earlier this year. The company’s rapid return to fundraising, alongside parallel IPO preparations from other AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI, reflects the scale of capital now required to remain competitive at the frontier of AI development as the industry’s biggest players continue racing to build out infrastructure and talent at an accelerating pace.
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