DeepSeek's first round of funding totaling 50 billion yuan finalized: Alibaba, Tencent, and the Big Fund each contributed 10 billion yuan

Aimpact News, May 11 (UTC+8). According to Beating Monitoring, DeepSeek’s first round of 50 billion RMB financing is close to being finalized. This round consists of 10 billion RMB each from Alibaba, Tencent, and the National Big Fund, plus founder Liang Wenfeng’s personal contribution of 20 billion RMB, bringing the company’s valuation to about 350 billion RMB. It is rumored that Huawei has also taken part in the investment negotiations, while conventional top-tier VC and PE firms were unable to secure a seat at the table.

Securing external financing has directly eased the dual crisis DeepSeek faces in terms of both talent and computing power. Previously, core team member Guo Daya left due to salary inversion and insufficient computing resources and joined ByteDance. To keep the team stable, DeepSeek has already doubled its current compensation, and core researchers’ equity incentives have reached the “eight-figure” level. On the computing side, although the real-world capabilities of the V4 model are approaching GPT-5.4, it remains difficult to adapt it at the underlying hardware level to chips such as Huawei Ascend, and some operators even require DeepSeek employees to help Huawei write code. The company urgently needs more funding to directly purchase high-end computing power.

After obtaining the massive funding, DeepSeek has begun transitioning from a pure research institution to AI product development and commercial hands-on practice. The company is accelerating its iteration pace, and it is expected to release the multimodal large model V4.1 in June. In the near term, recruitment demand has also clearly shifted toward multimodal and agent-related talent focused on commercial deployment.

(Source: BlockBeats)