DeepSeek Nears Close of $15 Billion Round With CATL and Tencent
DeepSeek is closing a $15 billion round led by CATL and Tencent, doubling its 50 billion yuan target. New backers include Midea, Meituan, Geely and GigaDevice as a STAR Market IPO looms.
By Daniel Okafor
2 min read
Updated
What's News
- DeepSeek is wrapping up a funding round of about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion), Reuters reported on Oct. 22.
- CATL and Tencent were the biggest investors; Midea, Meituan, Geely and GigaDevice joined as new backers.
- The round more than doubled DeepSeek's original 50 billion yuan target and drew over 15 investors.
- The deal values DeepSeek at 500 billion yuan before new capital, and follows the hiring of CITIC Securities for a potential STAR Market IPO.
- DeepSeek released its DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model last month.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is closing a funding round of roughly 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion), four people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday. That is double the company's original target of 50 billion yuan, and it values DeepSeek at 500 billion yuan before new capital arrives, Reuters has reported.
Battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and WeChat operator Tencent Holdings led the round as the biggest investors, two of the sources said. All four people declined to be named because the information is confidential.
Who is putting money in?
The round drew more than 15 investors in total, one source said. New entrants include:
- Midea, the home appliances maker
- Meituan, the food delivery giant
- Geely, the automaker
- GigaDevice, the semiconductor maker
Other participants include Boyu Capital, CPE and Legend Capital, alongside existing shareholder IDG Capital, three of the sources said.
What does the deal signal?
The scale of demand shows how much appetite exists among China's state-backed and corporate investors as Beijing pushes to get ahead of the United States in the AI race. DeepSeek will have raised twice what it first sought.
The round also moves DeepSeek closer to public markets. In September, Reuters reported the company had hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market.
On Thursday, Bloomberg first reported the $15 billion figure, citing sources who named CATL and Tencent as the main backers.
DeepSeek, CATL and Tencent could not immediately be reached for comment. The other firms named did not immediately respond to requests.
What happens next?
The fundraising is set to complete in the coming days, a second person said, though the financial details and the investor lineup are not ironclad and could still change.
DeepSeek shipped its latest model, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, last month. The company said the model was designed for greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput and scaling to larger models. A war chest of nearly $15 billion gives DeepSeek the compute and research budget to keep pace in a race where capital now determines who can train the next generation of models.
(Reported by Kane Wu in Hong Kong, with additional reporting by Devika Nair in Bengaluru, Yantoultra Ngui in Hong Kong, Zoey Zhang in Shanghai and the Beijing Newsroom.)
Source: GN: Startup Funding
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Correspondent covering money, funding and market shifts around entrepreneurship, startups and venture funding at Business Bearings.
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