BEIJING: The Chinese AI pioneer DeepSeek has raised about ¥100 billion (US$15 billion) in its latest fundraising round, one of the country’s largest ever and a sign of the startup’s ambitions to compete globally with the likes of Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.
The Hangzhou-based firm boosted its financing target at least twice as it talked with investors, from ¥50 billion to ¥80 billion before reaching the final tally, according to people familiar with the matter.
Battery pioneer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) and WeChat-operator Tencent Holdings Ltd were among the biggest investors in the round, said the people, asking not to be named as the details aren’t public.
DeepSeek’s funding sets the stage for one of the most highly anticipated Chinese market debuts in years.
The AI upstart triggered a US$1 trillion meltdown in global markets in 2025 when it showed the ability to compete with Silicon Valley’s leaders at a fraction of the cost of their models, but it’s never had the financial resources of the US frontier labs.
The latest fundraising shows that imbalance is beginning to moderate, although it still has far less financial firepower than Anthropic and OpenAI, which have each raised more than US$100 billion.
Like rival Moonshot, DeepSeek is preparing for an initial public offering that would be an important milestone for Chinese markets, Bloomberg News has reported.
DeepSeek has begun to spend more aggressively to build out AI data centres and to develop more open-source models for use in China and abroad.
The firm has regularly rolled out high-performance, low-cost models that put pressure on its domestic competitors and gained customers in the US and other overseas markets.
In September, for example, it dropped V4.1 Flash, setting off a drop in the share prices of local rivals MiniMax Group Inc and Z.AI Co.
DeepSeek, Tencent and CATL representatives didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.
More broadly, companies from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd to ByteDance Ltd have introduced low-cost AI services, typically open-sourced so customers can modify them as needed.
One widely shared benchmark chart from Artificial Analysis sketched out what has been called the “DeepSeek death zone,” where competitors will struggle to survive if they can’t beat the firm’s performance or they can’t charge lower prices.