15 OCT 2026 — Chinese financial media say DeepSeek is close to doubling its latest funding round to about 100 billion yuan without moving the price. The pre-money valuation remains about 500 billion yuan. If the round closes, the AI developer will have raised roughly 150 billion yuan in six months, which The Standard calls the largest primary-market financing in China this year.
None of this comes from DeepSeek, which has not commented. The figures trace back to a report by Caijing, carried by 36Kr and The Standard in Hong Kong on 13 October.
A round that doubled in two weeks
The reports say the round grew from a planned 50 billion yuan to nearly 100 billion "in just half a month", while the price per share did not move. New and existing investors are putting in roughly half each. Tencent and battery maker CATL are leading it, according to 36Kr, and new investors include Legend Capital, the investment arm of Lenovo Holdings, as well as carmaker Geely.
CATL is the clearest case of an existing backer digging deeper. Both outlets say it put about 5 billion yuan into the first round and plans another 10 billion yuan this time. That would still leave it behind founder Liang Wenfeng's roughly 20 billion yuan from the first round, 36Kr notes.
The signal came a week earlier
The larger figure was telegraphed a week earlier. On 6 October, The Straits Times carried a Bloomberg report saying DeepSeek was close to securing at least 80 billion yuan against an initial target of about 50 billion, and that signed term sheets pointed to a final total near 100 billion. People familiar with the matter said interest had outstripped expectations after DeepSeek released its V4 Flash model.
Why the valuation did not rise
Demand that doubles a round would usually push the price up. Here it did not, and the reports give a clue why: Liang is said to prefer industrial investors, companies whose businesses connect with DeepSeek's, over purely financial ones. One reading is that holding the valuation flat lets DeepSeek choose who comes in, instead of selling to whoever pays most.
The flat price also matters for the listing. In August, we reported a raise of close to US$8 billion at around 500 billion yuan, with a Shanghai listing targeted for 2027. The amount has roughly doubled since. The valuation has not.
Getting ready to list
The Standard reports that once the round closes, DeepSeek is expected to restructure and prepare for an initial public offering on the STAR Market, with CITIC Securities advising. 36Kr adds that DeepSeek hired its first chief financial officer in September, and that underwriters have been vetting investors' backgrounds so the shareholder structure meets listing rules, including a cap on shareholder numbers.
As we noted in September, hiring bankers is not the same as filing to list. No prospectus has been published yet.
Spending on robots
DeepSeek is also starting to invest outside its own walls. The Standard, citing Bloomberg, reports that it has agreed to lead a seed round worth tens of millions of US dollars in Winverse AI, a robotics AI start-up founded by a former Tencent scientist, at a valuation of about US$400 million. DeepSeek previously took a 2 per cent stake in Unitree Robotics. For a company known for cheap, efficient language models, the moves point towards physical AI, though DeepSeek has said nothing publicly about that strategy.
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