DeepSeek is moving toward a stock market debut, and the timeline is shorter than most people expected.
The Chinese AI company, best known for shaking up the industry last year with a model that matched top American systems while using far less computing power, has started working with accounting and banking advisors on an IPO.
According to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg, the plan is to file in mainland China by the end of this year, with an eye toward actually listing in 2027.
That filing date could slip to early next year depending on how quickly the company’s financial reports come together, but the direction is clear: DeepSeek is preparing to go public.
Before that happens, though, the company wants more money. Just weeks after closing a $7 billion funding round in early June, its first ever from outside investors, DeepSeek is already back in the market talking to new backers.
This time it’s targeting a valuation of at least 480 billion yuan, or roughly $71 billion. That’s a sharp jump from the $50 billion valuation it commanded in June.
The company is looking to raise at least 10 billion yuan, though the final number could end up much higher depending on investor interest.
The June round already included heavyweight names like Tencent and battery maker CATL, along with Beijing’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, a state vehicle that backs strategic tech companies.
That government involvement says something about how DeepSeek is viewed at home: not just as a startup, but as a genuine contender in China’s push to compete with Silicon Valley on AI, despite ongoing US restrictions on advanced chip exports.
Notably, DeepSeek runs its cloud service on chips from Huawei rather than Nvidia.
The company’s rise has been fast by any measure. Founded in 2023 as an offshoot of the hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek was a relatively obscure name until its model release last year stunned the industry with its efficiency.
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Since then it has become one of the most widely used AI systems in the world. In June alone, DeepSeek accounted for nearly 23% of all tokens processed through Vercel, an AI gateway used by enterprises, putting it just behind Anthropic’s 32% share.
The fundraising has also reshaped the fortune of DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng. His net worth more than doubled after the June round, jumping from about $16.7 billion to $36 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
That puts him ahead of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman in personal wealth, even though DeepSeek is a much younger company than either of theirs.
READ: Claude Maker Anthropic Files for IPO, Joins AI Lab Race to Go Public
Despite the funding push, DeepSeek’s leadership has told investors that the company isn’t chasing short-term profits.
Liang has reportedly told backers he intends to keep releasing open-source models and to stay focused on the long-term goal of building artificial general intelligence (AGI), rather than rushing to commercialize what the company already has.
The new capital is expected to go largely toward expanding computing capacity, a race every major AI lab is currently running as demand for training and running large models keeps climbing.
DeepSeek is also pushing into agentic AI, the category of software that can complete tasks on its own without step-by-step human direction, a space that has drawn growing attention across the industry.
Nothing here is finalized. Timing on both the fundraising and the IPO could still shift depending on market conditions and how DeepSeek’s financial reporting shapes up over the next few months.
