Liang Yuanpeng, founder of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek, has been suggested as a potential candidate to become China's richest person. If DeepSeek's corporate value surpasses 200 trillion won, there is speculation that Liang's wealth could exceed that of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
Bloomberg reported on the 11th (local time) that the corporate value of DeepSeek, which launched in 2023, was assessed to range from $1 billion (about 1.45 trillion won) to $150 billion (about 217.85 trillion won) based on a survey of seven AI experts and startup officials.
Chakanya Ramdev, founder of Sweetfree Telecom in Canada, evaluated DeepSeek's value at $150 billion, half that of OpenAI ($300 billion). Given that Liang is known to hold 84% of the equity both directly and indirectly, this basis would imply his wealth amounts to $126 billion (about 182.68 trillion won). This exceeds the estimated wealth of Jensen Huang, which is $114 billion (about 165.28 trillion won).
On the other hand, Rudina Seseiri, founder of the venture capital firm Glasswing Ventures, viewed DeepSeek's value as at least $1 billion, while Philip Schmid, a senior AI engineer at Google DeepMind, assessed it at over $6.2 billion (about 9 trillion won).
There are also analyses stating that determining the actual value of DeepSeek is difficult, as the corporate value of AI startups can fluctuate dramatically. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, is valued at $60 billion (about 87 trillion won), while Mistral, created by researchers from Google and Meta, is valued at $6 billion (about 8.7 trillion won). The Chinese AI corporation Zhifu saw its corporate value rise to 30 billion yuan (about 5.95 trillion won) last year.
There are indications that estimating Liang Yuanpeng's exact wealth is also not straightforward. The Chinese media outlet Jiemian News reported that DeepSeek operates relying on the profits from a quantitative hedge fund called High Flyer (幻方量化), founded by Liang in 2015, without receiving external investments.
High Flyer saw its assets under management (AUM) surge from 1 billion yuan (about 198.8 billion won) in 2016 to 10 billion yuan (about 1.99 trillion won) in 2019, and it currently stands at $8 billion (about 11.6 trillion won). This analysis indicates that DeepSeek's financial independence is being maintained based on this.