companies

DeepSeek AI

Chinese AI lab that develops and open-weights large language models (e.g. DeepSeek-V3, R1), spun out of the High-Flyer hedge fund.

DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016. DeepSeek is headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and was self-funded by High-Flyer with no external investors from inception, releasing a series of open-weight LLMs that gained global attention in January 2025 for matching frontier model performance at a fraction of the reported training cost. As of mid-2026, multiple outlets (Reuters, South China Morning Post) reported DeepSeek was nearing its first-ever external funding round, roughly $7.4 billion led by Tencent and CATL with participation from China's state-backed AI investment funds, at a valuation reported as high as $50-59 billion; as of this writing the round had not been publicly confirmed by the companies involved.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Hangzhou, China

Sector

lab