creators

Liang Wenfeng - founder and CEO of DeepSeek

Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023 out of his hedge fund High-Flyer's GPU cluster. Its R1 model shook AI markets in January 2025; V4 followed in April 2026.

Liang Wenfeng (born 1985 in Wuchuan, Guangdong) founded the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek and runs it. He took a bachelor's degree in electronic information engineering at Zhejiang University in 2007 and a master's in information and communication engineering there in 2010. He built trading firms before he built an AI lab: Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management in 2013, then the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016, whose profits paid for a large GPU cluster. DeepSeek was launched out of that infrastructure in May 2023. DeepSeek-R1, released on 20 January 2025, matched leading proprietary reasoning models at a reported fraction of their training cost, briefly topped the free-app chart on Apple's US App Store and set off a sell-off in AI hardware shares. The company published a preview of its V4 generation on 24 April 2026. He has not appeared in public since a televised meeting with Xi Jinping in February 2025. The South China Morning Post reported in April 2026 that a researcher, Chen Deli, had become the company's public face while Liang's control was undiminished. Caixin, reading a July 2026 corporate filing, put DeepSeek's post-money valuation above 350 billion yuan, about $52 billion, after a 50-billion-yuan round backed by Tencent and CATL. The same filing, as Caixin read it, left him holding 31.01 per cent of DeepSeek directly and 60.19 per cent through Ningbo Cheng'en. Forbes put his real-time net worth at $40 billion on 19 September 2026, ranking him 51st in the world.

Specialization

large language models, open-weight models, quantitative trading, AI compute infrastructure

Country

China