CATL and Tencent back Deepseek's ballooning funding round as the AI startup eyes a 2027 IPO
Deepseek is close to raising at least $12 billion in a new funding round, according to Bloomberg. The Chinese AI startup had originally aimed to raise about $7.5 billion at a valuation of roughly $75 billion, but people familiar with the matter said the total could approach $15 billion. Battery maker CATL and Tencent are contributing the largest shares.
The strong investor interest stems from Deepseek's V4-Flash model, which has set new benchmarks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI. After the round closes, Deepseek plans to restructure for an IPO in early 2027. The company is building a data center with at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei. Founder Liang Wenfeng wants to keep developing open models with freely available weights.
CATL declined to comment. Tencent and Deepseek did not respond.
Deepseek had paused the round after comments by Liang about the company's reliance on Nvidia chips went viral. In June, the company closed its first external funding round at about $7.4 billion with a valuation above $50 billion. Deepseek released V4-Pro and V4-Flash as preview versions in April and is also working on its own inference chip to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and Huawei.
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Deepseek is close to raising at least $12 billion in a new funding round, Bloomberg reports. The article CATL and Tencent back Deepseek's ballooning funding round as the AI startup eyes a 2027 IPO appeared first on The Decoder .