Money in, control out, for almost everyone

Until now, DeepSeek hadn’t taken a cent of outside investment. Founder Liang Wenfeng bankrolled the company entirely through profits from High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund he also founded.

“Money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem,” he famously said back in 2023.

That changed this week, and here’s one of the most interesting parts: Investors in the round didn’t buy equity in DeepSeek directly. Instead, according to The Information, their capital went into a limited partnership controlled by Liang. That structure comes with a five-year lock-up and zero voting rights, meaning that backers can’t easily sell their stake and have little say in how the company is run.

Earlier this month, Reuters had reported that founder Liang had committed 20 billion yuan of his own money in this funding round — making him both the company’s founder and its biggest investor in this round —and added that ​tech conglomerate ⁠Tencent is considering 10 billion yuan while battery giant CATL is looking at 5 billion ​yuan, which would make them the largest ​external ⁠investors.

Meanwhile, China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, a state vehicle Beijing uses to fund strategic tech sectors, reportedly invested directly into DeepSeek rather than through the limited partnership — and is the only backer that walked away with actual voting rights and no lock-up, according to the same reporting.

State alignment concerns

DeepSeek’s chatbot has millions of users all over the world, many drawn by the fact that it is free and open-weight. The governance structure of this round isn’t likely to change how the app works on the day to day.

However, it brings into keener focus a shadow that has trailed DeepSeek in many ways since its 2025 breakout: how close is the company to the Chinese state? How does that factor in for users handing the chatbot their data and queries?

DeepSeek already faces bans or restricted use in a number of countries and at some private companies over data-access concerns tied to Chinese law. This development and structure is likely to intensify scrutiny and vigilance from critics who have already raised questions around how closely China’s most prominent AI companies are aligned with state priorities.

Even at a $50 billion-plus valuation, though, DeepSeek is much smaller than its U.S. counterparts. Anthropic closed a $65 billion round in late May at a $965 billion valuation, and OpenAI closed a $122 billion round in March at $852 billion.

DeepSeek’s round is still one of the largest single financings in Chinese startup history — it’s perhaps playing in a different league than the American frontier labs it's often compared to.

DeepSeek has not publicly commented on the terms of the round as of this writing.