DeepSeek: a $7.5 billion second round and a billion dollars in annual revenue

As recently as spring, DeepSeek's annual revenue had not reached $500 million. Now, according to two sources at The Information cited by IT之家, the company has passed a billion dollars in annualized revenue and is closing a second funding round worth $7.5 billion.

In the first seven months of 2026, DeepSeek earned about 475 million yuan, ten times more than in all of 2025. Over the same period it spent roughly 11 billion yuan on AI infrastructure: renting servers with AI chips, buying chips and computing hardware. A year earlier those outlays came to about 1.2 billion yuan. Revenue is rising fast. Spending is rising faster.

The second round is aiming for 50 billion yuan, about $7.5 billion, at a pre-money valuation close to 500 billion yuan. The company wants to close the round by the end of October. Reuters reports that DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on China's innovation board. It plans to file this year and reach the market next year.

In the first round, closed in June, the company raised more than 50 billion yuan, and the post-money valuation passed 338 billion yuan. The largest single investor was Liang Wenfeng himself with about 20 billion yuan. Tencent added about 10 billion, companies tied to CATL about 5 billion, and smaller stakes went to JD, NetEase, IDG and a state AI development fund. The new round carries a five-year lock-up and gives outside investors no voting rights.

Liang reportedly told investors that more than 70 percent of the company's compute goes to training new models, leaving under 30 percent for serving existing ones. He also claims that raising API prices did not drive customers away, and that internal tests show the company's lighter models run stably on consumer cards.

In the background, access to the round itself is being traded. Intermediaries are asking for as much as 18 percent in upfront fees and 35 percent of future gains for a package with a nominal value of 100 million yuan, against a standard commission of about 2 percent. There are also multi-layered investment vehicles that add further layers of fees.

Those fees show how badly investors want into a company that until recently financed itself almost entirely from its own funds. They also eat into the potential return before the capital reaches the lab. DeepSeek faces the classic dilemma of a company growing faster than its ownership structure: money for training is available, but the price of raising it rises along with the interest. The announced Shanghai listing is meant to solve that problem. A stock exchange provides capital without intermediaries' fees, but it demands the transparency a Chinese lab is only now preparing for.