DeepSeek Aims to Close $7.5 Billion Funding Round by End-October

DeepSeek is aiming to complete its second funding round by the end of October as it prepares to go public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, The Information reported on Thursday. The company’s fundraising efforts may be fuelled by a boost in revenue, which has hit $1 billion on an annualized basis.

DeepSeek is targeting to raise 50 billion yuan ($7.5 billion) at a valuation of 500 billion yuan. Its revenue more than doubled from less than $500 million a few months ago following a recent price hike, which did not affect the popularity of its models, CEO Liang Wenfeng shared in a recent meeting with investors.

Last month, DeepSeek raised the price of its models by 2.3 to 4.5 times. It remains one of the cheapest options among major large language models globally. Liang told investors that DeepSeek’s customer base was unaffected by the price hike, reflecting strong user demand.

DeepSeek’s revenue stems almost entirely from charging for model access through APIs. Despite the growth, Liang said generating more revenue hasn’t been a priority. The company has continued to invest in developing new models, allocating more than 70% of its computing capacity to model training and less than 30% to inference.