IT Home October 13 news: According to Caijing, several people involved in this round of transactions revealed that the latest funding round of large model company DeepSeek is nearing completion, with the amount raised increasing from the previously planned 50 billion yuan to about 100 billion yuan — the intended funding amount doubled in less than half a month.
According to IT Home, this round is DeepSeek's second round of funding. Reports say new and existing shareholders each intend to invest roughly half of the amount. Notably, the doubling of the funding amount has not pushed up the company's overall valuation; DeepSeek's current pre-money valuation remains at about 500 billion yuan.
According to deal insiders citing multiple independent sources, new investors in this round include Shixi Capital, SMIC Juyuan, CPE Yuanfeng, Legend Capital, and Geely, mainly industrial investors. In addition, the old shareholders who entered in the first round are also on this round's deal list, including CATL, Tencent, IDG Capital, Lishi Capital, and Shixiang Capital. Among them, CATL is increasing its investment, planning to add about 10 billion yuan, having contributed about 5 billion yuan in the first round.
Further reading
According to IT Home's previous reports, DeepSeek's first round of external financing began in the 4th month of 2026 and completed delivery at the end of the 6th month, with an overall financing scale of about 510 亿 yuan and a post-money valuation approaching 4000 亿 yuan, the largest single round of financing to date in China's AI large model industry. Among them, founder Liang Wenfeng personally contributed about 200 亿 yuan, the largest single contributor; Tencent contributed about 100 亿 yuan, the CATL system contributed about 50 亿 yuan (including CATL and Puquan Capital), NetEase, JD.com, Lishi Capital, and IDG Capital each contributed about 30 亿 yuan, Zhengxingu Investment and Shixiang Technology each contributed about 15 亿 yuan, and the National AI Industry Investment Fund contributed about 9.8 亿 yuan.
The new investors in this round mostly have distinct industrial backgrounds: Shixi Capital was founded by GigaDevice, a leading memory chip maker, together with an investment team, focusing on integrated circuit design and semiconductor materials; SMIC Juyuan is backed by SMIC; Legend Capital is an investment platform under Legend Holdings; and Geely is a leading automaker. Caijing pointed out that, compared with the first round, Liang Wenfeng preferred industrial investors in the second round who can bring upstream and downstream industry chain empowerment to DeepSeek.
While the financing is progressing, DeepSeek is also accelerating its IPO pace. According to Caijing's previous reports, since late in the 8th month of 2026, DeepSeek has been in contact with multiple investment banks to prepare for a STAR Market listing, and has hired CITIC Securities, planning to file as early as the end of 2026 with a target of listing in 2027. Transaction sources also revealed that starting from the end of the 9th month of 2026, the sponsoring underwriters have been assisting DeepSeek in vetting investors' backgrounds, requiring investors to adjust some special-purpose funds to blind pool registration so that, when filing the IPO, the fund counts as 1 shareholder in the shareholder count statistics, avoiding underlying LPs being counted through look-through aggregation toward the 200-shareholder red line. In addition, Yan Wentao, formerly a partner at Hillhouse Ventures, joined DeepSeek as CFO in the late part of the 9th month of 2026.
Public information shows that DeepSeek was founded by the quantitative hedge fund Zhejiang Jiuzhang Asset Management Co., Ltd. (formerly Hangzhou Huanfang Technology Co., Ltd.), established in 2023. In September 2026, DeepSeek released its latest model DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash; additionally, reports say its annualized revenue has exceeded 1 billion US dollars.