Why DeepSeek Is Raising $15 Billion After Building Its Name on Doing More With Less

DeepSeek built its reputation on frugality. In January 2025 the Hangzhou lab rattled US tech stocks by shipping models that rivaled American systems at a fraction of the cost. Now it is collecting money on a scale that looks a lot less frugal.

The company is wrapping up a funding round that has pulled in about 100 billion yuan, or roughly $15 billion, from existing and new investors, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Battery maker CATL and WeChat operator Tencent were among the biggest backers, one of those people said. The round should be complete in the coming days, but the other person told Reuters the financial details are not ironclad and could change.

Bloomberg broke the story first, reporting that DeepSeek had raised $15 billion with CATL and Tencent as its main backers. Investing.com, summarizing that report, said DeepSeek raised its target at least twice, from 50 billion yuan to 80 billion yuan and then higher.

Who gets a seat at the table

The investor list says as much as the amount. In early October, CNBC reported that DeepSeek was vetting prospective investors closely, turning away private funds raised from individual investors and limiting the pool largely to government and corporate money. CATL, Geely Auto, Monolith Management and Loyal Valley Capital had committed capital, one source told CNBC. Reuters described many of the round's investors as backed by the state and big corporations.

That is not a typical venture round. When a battery company and a messaging empire write the biggest checks into a model lab, they are buying strategic position, not just a future exit multiple.

Price was a sticking point. CNBC's sources said the round, first expected to close by the end of August, dragged on as some investors wavered. DeepSeek was seeking a valuation of about 500 billion yuan, or $75 billion, those people told CNBC. Its first outside round, which closed in June, raised about 50 billion yuan, and an investor filing tied to that deal implied a valuation of roughly 350 billion yuan, CNBC reported. No outlet has yet reported a final valuation for the current round.

The money math

Add the two rounds together and DeepSeek has taken in roughly 150 billion yuan from outside investors this year. At the exchange rate Reuters used, that works out to about $22 billion, for a company that first took outside capital this year, according to CNBC.

It is still a smaller war chest than US rivals hold. Investing.com, summarizing Bloomberg, noted that OpenAI and Anthropic have each raised more than $100 billion. The sharper question is what a lab famous for squeezing performance out of scarce compute does with this much cash. Bloomberg has reported that DeepSeek is already spending more on data centers and open source models. Its latest release, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, arrived in September, and the company said it was designed for greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput and scaling to larger models.

Founder Liang Wenfeng has been blunt about the gap. CNBC reported that talks were briefly suspended after Liang reportedly told investors privately that Chinese AI companies still lagged far behind US rivals and leaned heavily on Nvidia chips.

An awkward week to raise

The round lands days after the Department of Homeland Security made public an order removing DeepSeek products from federal civilian IT systems, a move Beijing has loudly protested, as we covered on Tuesday.

"May result in the transfer of sensitive data to the [People's Republic of China] if used by U.S. government employees or vendors." Department of Homeland Security, exclusion order as quoted by Politico

Chinese capital does not look deterred. If anything, the backers lining up suggest Washington's restrictions make a domestic champion more valuable to them.

A public listing appears to be the next step. Reuters reported in September that DeepSeek had hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market, and Bloomberg reported earlier this month that it was eyeing an IPO in early 2027. Until the round formally closes and the terms are public, the $15 billion figure remains what Reuters calls it: a number that could still move.