Liang Wenfeng has taken the CFO position, and he has previously invested in Zhipu AI and MiniMax.

DeepSeek's first-ever CFO may finally be on the way.

And he is a post-90s generation.

Yan Wentao, born in 1991, Partner of GL Ventures, is a pretty young face in China's venture capital circle.

Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that DeepSeek plans to hire him as the company's first CFO.

Young as he is, he has already delivered many remarkable achievements (just kidding).

The projects he participated in include ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, J&T Express...

Also:

MiniMax, Zhipu AI.

It's amazing that this man who has invested in almost all of Liang Wenfeng's rivals is set to become DeepSeek's first CFO (meme).

After thorough digging, the team from QbitAI found that —

This guy even worked as a reporter for *21st Century Business Herald* when he was in college??

He is a really interesting person, welcome everyone to dig into this gossip together.

It's Extremely Hard to Recruit a CFO

To add some background, as early as February 2025, DeepSeek had posted the CFO position on recruitment channels.

At that time, its R1 model had just become a hit for a month, the whole world was scrambling for talents from DeepSeek, but the company itself was recruiting a person in charge of capital.

Then, there was no follow-up movement at all...

Yes, this position has been vacant all this time. It is said that the company's funds during this period were all managed by people with professional financial backgrounds.

I was totally shocked, how could a company valued at hundreds of billions of yuan leave the CFO position vacant for a year and a half??

It actually did. Because DeepSeek did not lack money at all in the past, High-Flyer Quant was its cash cow, with an AUM of about 70 billion yuan in 2025 and an average return rate of 56.6%.

This is also related to the company's own style. Liang Wenfeng has always had his own pace for capital expenditure.

Restraint is a kind of strategy. There are bigger watermelons waiting ahead, and what you see in front of you may all be just sesame seeds.

But this year, the pace has changed.

In July, DeepSeek restarted CFO recruitment and began to conduct intensive interviews with young partners from top VCs.

Heads of 5Y Capital, HSG, and Dragon Capital have all had face-to-face talks with Liang Wenfeng about this position in the past.

The top leaders of institutions managing hundreds of billions of yuan are queuing up for the CFO interview of a startup company...

It's pretty surreal. Back in 2023, it was DeepSeek that took the initiative to reach out to VCs to pitch itself, but was collectively turned down, with the reason that no return path could be seen.

Three years later, the party B has become the party A, the High-Flyer version of *If You Are the One* is now on air (just kidding).

The one who laughs last is a post-90s.

From GL Ventures.

Who Is Yan Wentao?

Yan Wentao, born in 1991, is 35 years old this year.

He studied at Fudan University and graduated in 2013, then started his career in internet investment.

13 years later, you can barely find any trace of this name on the Chinese internet.

As a Managing Director at GL Ventures and a person on two industry ranking lists, his public traces are almost as thin as transparent.

His only public speech was at the 14th Venture Capital Conference of Securities Times in July 2026.

That was 50 days before he was exposed to join DeepSeek.

But I pushed the timeline further back and found a really interesting thing!

Looking back at the internet 13 years ago, there is another "Yan Wentao" that can be found —

He also graduated from Fudan University, and also entered the internet investment industry after graduation.

This is really fun, it turns out that this guy's college life is so rich, I'm going to dig into all the gossip.

*Xinmin Evening News* reported back then that he raised many small animals when he was a kid, so he resolutely chose the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering of Fudan University for his bachelor's degree.

After enrolling, he found that it was not at all what he had imagined...

So he quickly switched tracks and started campus entrepreneurship, launching Fido, a campus discount platform that provided mobile newspaper services, operated a website and issued physical discount cards.

It was extremely popular, with monthly profit exceeding 10,000 yuan, and even secured financing.

At its peak, we signed contracts with more than 100 merchants, and 14 universities in Shanghai used our services.

Unfortunately, the project failed later, Yan Wentao put his entrepreneurial journey on hold. As a sophomore, he turned his sight to consulting and went for internships at BCG and Roland Berger.

He was only 19 at that time, the youngest intern in China's entire consulting industry.

He also went to Stanford University as an exchange student during that period.

No one expected that in 2013, his identity changed completely again —

Wait, how did we become peers??

Yes, this guy worked as an intern reporter for the technology section of *21st Century Business Herald*. There are still many articles under his byline online, covering topics from mobile advertising, e-commerce tax to the internet of things...

The most interesting part is that he also reported on his future employer during this period —

Tencent.

It was also at this point of time that he suddenly disappeared from all media reports.

Yan Wentao officially stepped into the investment industry.

In 2013, Yan Wentao joined the investment circle, starting his career at Tencent Investment, then later went to H Capital.

We won't go into details about this early experience, as there is not much public information available.

The key story started in 2020, when Yan Wentao joined GL Ventures.

It is an independent brand founded by Zhang Lei, with a fund size of tens of billions of yuan, independent decision-making power, focusing on early-stage technology investment.

It is not hard to see that this is a key move for GL Ventures to deepen its layout in early-stage technology tracks. So from the very first day of its establishment, it was destined to need a group of young investors who understand cutting-edge technologies.

Yan Wentao joined the industry right at this trend.

His growth speed is really staggering, he was promoted to new partner in only six years.

During this period, he managed quite a number of top-tier projects, his representative investments include:

ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, two new giants in the mobile internet sector.

J&T Express and Microstrategy, one is a express delivery enterprise, the other is a securities firm, both of which have finally gone public successfully.

But the most important ones are the two AI companies that performed extremely well on the Hong Kong stock market this year:

Zhipu AI and MiniMax.

It's a little unbelievable that he seems to make every investment a success...

I looked through the sharing he made at the venture capital conference this July, there is no secret at all, it's just the common-sense methodology that everyone has heard of.

The best investment window for every wave of technological revolution is very short. If you miss it, it will be very difficult to make profits when you enter the market later.

If you miss the window, you should look for the next generation of technological direction. If you still pour capital into the overheated popular tracks, there must be something wrong with your strategy.

You must "make the investment right before the outbreak of the track".

He has always been adhering to this set of methodology.

In 2020, when the Chinese internet was still discussing the community group buying track, Yan Wentao had already started to study large models and pay attention to the newly launched GPT-3.

In 2023, when ChatGPT completely exploded, he turned around and focused on embodied intelligence.

Now, Yan Wentao's name is clearly on the board of directors list of Stone Intelligence.

Interestingly, GL Ventures has been a real "Huangpu Military Academy" for young CFOs in recent years.

Zhang Yuan, the current CEO of Mixue Bingcheng, left GL Ventures in 2023 to take the CFO position at Mixue, and was officially promoted to CEO this March.

Xue Zizhao, the first investor from GL Ventures to contact MiniMax, also joined MiniMax directly later.

Now, it's Yan Wentao's turn to step down from the investment industry to take the corporate management position.

The Whale Leaps Over the Dragon Gate

When he was 19 years old, Yan Wentao first entered a consulting firm. A senior manager said to him with emotion:

If I had entered the industry at the age of 19, I would have become a partner long ago.

More than ten years later, Yan Wentao did become a partner.

Then at around 35 years old, he moved from GL Ventures to DeepSeek.

And the first major battle for DeepSeek's first CFO will be leading the company to go public.

On September 9, Reuters broke the news that DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare for its STAR Market IPO, planning to submit application materials as early as the end of this year, and strive for listing in 2027.

After the news came out, both DeepSeek and CITIC Securities remained silent, but the entire market was already in an uproar.

But you have to know that in the first half of this year, DeepSeek's ARR is estimated to be only 3.5 billion yuan...

What does that mean?

At present, the valuation DeepSeek is seeking in its series B financing is about 500 billion yuan, which is more than 100 times higher than its ARR.

Even A-share investors will be stunned for three seconds after seeing this number.

No matter how good the AI story the STAR Market can tell, this is a rare valuation case in history.

At the same time, this is estimated to be the toughest battle Yan Wentao has ever fought.

Then why is the company in such a hurry to go public?

For no other reason, the money is still not enough to spend.

There are two layers of reasons:

1. Large model development is the most capital-intensive business on this planet.

Training requires computing power, inference requires computing power, computing power relies on chips, chips cost money. At this scaling stage, no matter how good your engineering optimization is, it can't reduce the capital demand.

What's more, High-Flyer Quant, which raised DeepSeek from scratch, has not had an easy time in the past two years.

2. You can't retain talents without sufficient funds.

Liang Wenfeng himself once admitted that the biggest risk for DeepSeek is team stability.

As long as I can maintain the stability of the team, I will definitely be able to achieve AGI.

But Luo Fuli was poached by Xiaomi, Guo Daya joined ByteDance's Seed team, Wang Bingxuan joined Tencent Hunyuan...

The AGI dream team has already shown a trend of talent loss.

But things will be different once the company goes public, the options can finally be cashed out