DeepSeek finally fills its chief financial officer post

For three years after it was founded, DeepSeek had no chief financial officer. That changed on 21 September, when Yan Wentao joined the company. Until recently he was a partner at Hillhouse Venture Capital (高瓴创投). IT之家 reported the move, citing the industry outlet 投资界.

Yan was born in 1991 and graduated from Fudan University. From 2013 to 2020 he worked at Tencent Investment and H Capital, then moved to Hillhouse in 2020. His investment portfolio includes ByteDance, Zhipu, MiniMax, Xiaohongshu and J&T Express. Sources close to DeepSeek say Liang Wenfeng wanted a chief financial officer born in the nineties from the start.

Filling the post matters more than an ordinary staffing change. Reuters reported on 9 September that DeepSeek had hired CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on Shanghai's innovation board. The company plans to file an application this year and to list next year. In such a process the chief financial officer handles the audit, the shareholding structure and talks with regulators. All of that had been on hold during the three-year vacancy.

At the same time the company is tidying up its list of investors. In the last two weeks before the second round closed, DeepSeek checked who ultimately owned the capital. It turned away some entities with state backing, some unlisted companies and some individual investors. That answers a problem that came up during the previous round, when some investors built multi-layered vehicles to resell access to the shares at a markup.

According to reports, representatives of several other large Chinese funds also talked to Liang about the same post: 五源资本, 红杉资本 and 龙珠资本. The industry read those talks cautiously. Some of them may have been a chance to gather information about the terms of the deal. In the end Liang chose an outside candidate and the network of investor contacts that came with him.

Filling the chief financial officer post is more than a personnel change in this story. A stock market debut requires audited reporting, an orderly shareholding structure and a person who will talk to institutional investors. A candidate with a background in a venture capital fund rather than corporate accounting is a choice for a specific stage: first the round has to be closed and the paperwork prepared, and only then does managing the finances of a public company begin. The three-year gap in this post and the speed with which it was filled right after the terms of the round were set are the clearest sign that the decision was tied to the debut calendar.