Tencent and Alibaba are in advanced talks to anchor DeepSeek's first outside funding round, according to reporting from Bloomberg and The Information on April 24. DeepSeek is seeking more than $300 million at a valuation of at least $20 billion, and investor demand reportedly pushed the headline number higher within 48 hours of the round opening. Tencent has proposed taking as much as a 20 percent stake; DeepSeek is said to be reluctant to part with that much equity.
DeepSeek had previously been bankrolled entirely by founder Liang Wenfeng's hedge fund High-Flyer, and the company has been almost theatrically uninterested in venture capital. The shift comes the same week as the V4-Pro and V4-Flash launch and reflects the operational reality of running a frontier lab: even with its much-vaunted training efficiency, scaling inference for a one-million-token-context model and supporting an enterprise customer base costs real money.
If the round closes near the reported number, it would put DeepSeek at half the valuation of MiniMax — a useful reference for how Chinese investors are pricing frontier labs against US peers. Anthropic and OpenAI sit at valuations an order of magnitude higher, but they also have an order of magnitude more revenue. The interesting question is whether DeepSeek's open-weights strategy, which trades enterprise lock-in for ecosystem reach, will compress or widen that gap.
For learners: the funding side of AI is not separate from the technical side. Who owns a frontier lab, what they are willing to give up to scale, and which strategic investors get a seat at the table all shape what the lab is allowed to ship and to whom. A 20 percent strategic stake is not a passive check — it's a relationship that will show up in product decisions for years.