Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek is reportedly seeking to raise funds with a target corporations value of more than $20 billion (about 30 trillion won).
On the 22nd (local time), U.S. information technology (IT) outlet The Information said DeepSeek had begun raising outside capital for the first time since its founding and is in talks with Tencent and Alibaba.
On the 17th, The Information reported that DeepSeek was pursuing at least $300 million (about 444.1 billion won) in funding after being valued at more than $10 billion (about 14.8 trillion won). Since then, as investor interest quickly widened, the target corporations value is interpreted to have been raised to roughly double in a short period.
However, the investment talks are still underway, and the final corporations value and the size of the raise could change.
The corporations showing interest in investing are Chinese corporations such as Tencent and Alibaba. Given that DeepSeek is a Chinese corporations, some U.S. venture capital firms could take a cautious stance on investing, according to some analyses. DeepSeek, Tencent and Alibaba did not provide separate comments in response to requests for comment.
DeepSeek drew global attention in Jan. last year by unveiling a low-cost open-source AI model. At the time, the model "DeepSeek-V3" was trained using 2,048 of Nvidia's H800 graphics processing units (GPUs), and the development expense was known to be about $5,576,000 (about 8.2 billion won).