DeepSeek

In July 2023, Liang Wenfeng spun off a research lab from his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and called it DeepSeek. The lab was registered as Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. on July 17, 2023. At that point, High-Flyer had already been using AI for all its trading decisions since 2021, and Liang had been stockpiling Nvidia chips since as early as 2021, anticipating the need for serious computing power. DeepSeek operated for eighteen months as a privately funded lab before seeking outside money.

The company released its first major model, DeepSeek-V2, in June 2024, triggering a price war among Chinese AI companies including ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Zhipu AI. But the real explosion came in January 2025, when DeepSeek-R1 hit the app store. It became the most downloaded free iOS app in the United States, surpassing ChatGPT. The model was trained for under $6 million, a fraction of what competitors spend, and it used a Mixture of Experts architecture with 671 billion total parameters but only 37 billion activated per token. That efficiency, combined with aggressive pricing at $0.55 per million input tokens, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and triggered a stock market selloff.

DeepSeek employs about 160 to 200 people, mostly young graduates from top Chinese universities. Liang Wenfeng himself is deeply involved in the research and prefers hiring local talent over returnees from overseas. The company's approach is open-source, sharing model parameters under permissive licenses, which has made it popular in the developer community and in regions like Africa where language support is expanding. In 2025, DeepSeek raised $7.4 billion in its first external funding round at a valuation of up to $59 billion, with investors including Tencent and CATL. Liang committed up to $2.8 billion of his own money to maintain control, increasing his direct stake from 1% to 34%. The company faces scrutiny over data scraping allegations and national security concerns, but it continues to push forward, with development underway on future versions. [edit]