# DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng says company raised USD 7.4 billion in first outside round

Digest AI · Business & Funding · published 2026-10-26T18:30:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/deepseek-founder-liang-wenfeng-says-company-raised-usd-7-4-billion-in

## Summary

Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, used profits from his hedge fund High-Flyer to start the AI company in 2023. In 2026, DeepSeek raised about USD 7.4 billion in its first outside funding round, with Liang contributing around USD 3 billion himself. A second round has reportedly raised about USD 15 billion from investors including CATL and Tencent, according to Bloomberg. The company is valued at about USD 50 billion following the first round. DeepSeek’s models, such as V3 and R1, are designed for efficiency, using techniques like mixture of experts and sparse attention to reduce computing costs. The V3 model has 671 billion parameters but activates only about 37 billion per token, and its final training run cost about USD 5.6 million in GPU time. R1, released in January 2025, matched top rivals on tests at lower cost and was open source, contributing to a reported nearly USD 600 billion drop in NVIDIA’s market value in one day. DeepSeek has around 173 million downloads since January 2025, per Fortune. Liang maintains control with about 81.7% ownership after the first round, per Qichacha data cited by Bloomberg. The company keeps prices low and avoids overtime, aiming for reasonable profit. Liang is reportedly considering a move into robotics, though DeepSeek has not commented.

## Key points

- DeepSeek raised about USD 7.4 billion in first outside round in June 2026, with Liang Wenfeng putting in around USD 3 billion
- A second round has reportedly raised about USD 15 billion from investors such as CATL and Tencent, per Bloomberg
- DeepSeek’s V3 model has 671B parameters but uses only ~37B per token, with final training run costing about USD 5.6M in GPU time

## Why it matters

DeepSeek’s efficient, low-cost AI models challenge the assumption that cutting-edge AI requires massive spending, influencing how companies approach model development and investment in AI infrastructure.

## Sources

1. [Liang Wenfeng: How DeepSeek’s Founder is Disrupting AI with Efficiency](https://analyticsinsight.net/artificial-intelligence/liang-wenfeng-how-deepseeks-founder-is-disrupting-ai-with-efficiency) (analyticsinsight.net, 2026-10-26)

Part of the developing story: [DeepSeek Secures Massive Funding For AI Expansion](https://digestai.news/thread/deepseek-raises-at-least-12b-with-catl-tencent-backing-v4-flash-model) (6 stories)

## Cite

Digest AI, "DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng says company raised USD 7.4 billion in first outside round", 26 October 2026, https://digestai.news/story/deepseek-founder-liang-wenfeng-says-company-raised-usd-7-4-billion-in

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