DeepSeek has raised approximately 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest fundraising round, making it one of China's largest-ever financings, Bloomberg reported on October 22, citing people familiar with the matter1,2.
Battery maker CATL and Tencent were among the biggest contributors to the round3. The Hangzhou-based company had originally targeted 50 billion yuan before raising its goal to 80 billion yuan and ultimately settling on the final amount.
The investor roster carries strategic weight beyond capital. CATL is described as the world's largest battery maker, bringing industrial clout and potential customers, while Tencent offers distribution through WeChat and cloud resources4. The fundraising drew both existing and new investors, with two people familiar with the deal telling Reuters the round could wrap in the coming days, though financial details are not yet final and could still change.
Tencent's participation follows a period of heavy AI infrastructure spending. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent recently ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 GPUs worth over $35 billion collectively[2].
The round also positions DeepSeek closer to public markets. Reuters previously reported that the company hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market, a tech-focused exchange.
DeepSeek traces its origins to High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund co-founded by Liang Wenfeng in 2015. The firm pushed into artificial general intelligence research in 2023, establishing DeepSeek as an independent research group in May of that year and incorporating it in Hangzhou later in 2023.
Last month, the company released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, which it said was designed for greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput, and scaling to larger models.
ANALYSIS The round's final size, double the original target, reflects strong demand from both state-linked and corporate capital at a moment when the company is simultaneously preparing for a public listing. DeepSeek, CATL, and Tencent could not be immediately reached for comment.