DeepSeek's first $10B+ funding round — Liang Wenfeng commits to keep models open and chase AGI

Days after making the 75% V4 Pro discount permanent, DeepSeek is raising its first-ever external round — a reported 70B yuan (~$10B+) at a ~$45B pre-money valuation. Founder Liang Wenfeng pledged to investors he'll keep shipping open weights and prioritize AGI research over short-term commercial wins.

Two days after DeepSeek made the 75% V4 Pro price discount permanent, the company is doing what looks like the other half of the same story: raising its first external funding round, reportedly ~~70 billion yuan (~~$10 billion+) at a ~$45 billion pre-money valuation.

Per Bloomberg’s May 22 reporting and parallel coverage, founder Liang Wenfeng made two commitments to investors in the pitch:

Continue shipping open-weight models. No pivot to closed-source-only.
Prioritize AGI research over short-term commercialization. No “build out enterprise sales motion in 18 months and IPO” playbook.

These commitments matter because they’re being made to investors — i.e., this is the price tag of the round, not marketing.

The numbers

Round size: ~$10B+ (70B yuan)
Pre-money valuation: ~$45B
Type: First external financing since DeepSeek was founded in 2023 (until now, fully owned by Liang’s hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer)
Liang’s personal stake: Reportedly injecting an additional ~20B yuan personally, retaining a veto stake
Potential backers: National AI Industry Investment Fund, Tencent, IDG Capital, Monolith Capital, JD.com, NetEase, possibly CATL

If finalized at these numbers, this would be one of the largest first-time financings in Chinese tech startup history.

Why this matters for builders

Three things to read into this beyond the headline:

1. The price floor on agent-tier API is now strategic, not promotional. Last week’s framing of V4 Pro’s 75% discount as “promotional” gave room to bet that prices would normalize. The permanent discount + simultaneous $10B+ raise reframes that: DeepSeek has the capital to sustain the new price floor indefinitely. Builders pricing into 2026 production budgets can treat the $0.435 / $0.87 V4 Pro pricing as the new baseline, not a special.

2. Open-weight cadence is funded for the long run. The single most useful signal in Liang’s investor pledge is “continue shipping open weights.” If you’ve been waiting on DeepSeek’s open-weight versions (V3.5-Lite or similar) as your self-host alternative to Qwen (see open-weight watch), the funding round substantially de-risks that roadmap. Open-weight releases need ongoing GPU + research spend; $10B raised on a “keep doing what you’re doing” thesis is the strongest signal we’ve seen.

3. AGI prioritization translates into a specific product behavior. “Prioritize AGI research over short-term commercialization” in practice means: expect DeepSeek to keep releasing models that compete on the next benchmark rather than on the current enterprise feature checklist. For builders, this is a positive: research-driven labs produce models you’d actually want to use, even if the documentation is sparse and the SLAs are unclear.

Honest caveats

These numbers are from third-party reporting (Bloomberg, multiple Chinese-language sources). DeepSeek has not officially confirmed the round size at the time of writing. Treat as “directionally accurate, magnitudes unverified.”
“Continue open weights” is a verbal pledge to investors in private meetings — not a contractual commitment. If economics change, so might the pledge.
DeepSeek operates in the Chinese regulatory environment. Export-control or data-residency policy shifts can change the picture overnight in ways the company can’t unilaterally fix.

What it changes for your stack

If your application was already using DeepSeek V4 Pro or V4 Flash on Alibaba Cloud / DashScope: no change today, but a much stronger expected-value argument for continuing. Self-hosting plans on Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B can plan to potentially swap to a DeepSeek open weight when one drops.

If your application was evaluating between Claude Haiku 4.5 and DeepSeek V4 Pro purely on price: see our Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Claude Haiku 4.5 comparison for the agent-tier frame, then re-add DeepSeek as “open-weight-eventually + permanent price floor + funded for the long run.” The case for DeepSeek as a serious production option just got stronger.