Breaking: DeepSeek is set to complete its second round of financing totaling 100 billion yuan.

Beijing time October 13, according to Caijing reports, DeepSeek, the large model company led by Liang Wenfeng, is about to complete a new round of financing of nearly 100 billion yuan with a pre-money valuation of 500 billion yuan. After completing the record-breaking first round of financing of over 50 billion yuan in June that set a new record in China's venture capital history, DeepSeek's second round of financing is also record-breaking!

According to reports, DeepSeek originally planned to raise 50 billion yuan in the second round, but in just half a month, the financing amount doubled directly to 100 billion yuan, while the valuation did not increase, still at about 500 billion yuan pre-money.

This round will be jointly led by Tencent and CATL, with new and existing shareholders planning to invest roughly half of the total amount respectively, new incoming investors include Stony Creek Capital, SMC Capital, CPE Yuanfeng, Legend Capital, Geely and others, which are dominated by industrial investments. The investors that participated in the first round include CATL, Tencent, IDG Capital, Lisi Capital and Shixiang Capital.

It is confirmed that CATL plans to make an additional investment of about 10 billion yuan. Previously, CATL invested about 5 billion yuan in the first round. Once the investment is completed successfully, CATL may become the largest external investor with a total investment of about 15 billion yuan, which is still less than Liang Wenfeng's personal contribution of 20 billion yuan in the first round of financing.

Investors are flocking to this investment with huge sums of money, because this is destined to be a capital feast, and more importantly, DeepSeek itself is worth the price.

This is called a capital feast because in the United States, the valuations of leading players Anthropic and OpenAI have both exceeded 1 trillion US dollars, and their expected IPO valuations are rumored to be close to 2 trillion US dollars. As the world's two leading AI players, China will inevitably produce AI companies with matching valuations.

DeepSeek is worth the price, because DeepSeek R1, which made a stunning debut on January 20, 2025, caused the total market value of leading US AI tech stocks to shrink by about 1 trillion US dollars on that day, and NVIDIA's market value alone evaporated by about 590 billion US dollars in a single day.

This is a capital feast, and more importantly, DeepSeek's IPO process is accelerating. Below is the timeline of DeepSeek's capital market moves this year:

1. April 2026: Launched the first round of financing with a valuation of 350 billion yuan;

2. End of June 2026: Completed the delivery of the first round of financing of over 50 billion yuan;

3. July 2026: Launched a new round of financing, with the pre-money valuation rising to about 500 billion yuan;

4. August 2026: Caijing reported that DeepSeek has actively contacted a number of investment banks since late August to prepare for listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, planning to submit the application before the end of the year, with the goal of getting listed in 2027;

5. September 2026: Yan Wentao, who used to work at GL Ventures, took office as DeepSeek's first CFO since its establishment;

6. End of September 2026: Financial reports said the sponsoring securities firms have started to assist DeepSeek in auditing the backgrounds of investors to make the investment structure more compliant with IPO requirements. Therefore, DeepSeek requires investors to adjust some special funds to blind pool filings, the purpose of which is to count the fund as 1 shareholder in the unified calculation of the number of shareholders when applying for IPO, avoid the situation that underlying LPs are penetrated and merged into the 200-shareholder red line, and also reduce the pressure of regulatory inquiries;

Liang Wenfeng has always emphasized that he would not raise financing before, and after starting to raise funds, he has set many audit requirements for investors. In this round of financing as high as 100 billion yuan, Liang Wenfeng prefers to choose industrial investors.

The lead investors Tencent and CATL are industrial investors. The new incoming Stony Creek Capital was initiated and established by the joint investment team of GigaDevice, a leading storage company. Legend Capital is an investment platform under Lenovo Holdings; Geely is a leading complete vehicle manufacturer.

According to reports, Liang Wenfeng is considering entering the embodied intelligence field, in addition to participating in the IPO strategic placement of Unitree Robotics with 141 million yuan in August, the latest report says he is considering investing in Winverse AI, the embodied brain startup founded by Hu Han, former head of Tencent's Hunyuan Multimodal team, and is expected to lead the multimillion-dollar seed round, with Meituan Longzhu Capital participating as a follower.

However, some reports also say that DeepSeek may set up its own team to research and develop embodied intelligence.

Wang Xingxing from Unitree Robotics said yesterday at the 26th China International Industry Fair that the biggest mistake he has made in the past ten years is not paying enough attention to AI. Now he believes that with the development of AI, the critical point of embodied intelligence may come faster, even within one or two years. GPT-7 to be released next year may break through the current bottleneck of embodied intelligence.

This may also be the reason why DeepSeek wants to invest in and get deeply involved in the embodied intelligence track.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Chezhi" (ID: invehc), author: Michael Yuan, republished by 36Kr with authorization.