DeepSeek is getting closer and closer to the largest IPO financing in China's history.

Industrial capital giants are scrambling to pour funds into DeepSeek again.

On October 22, multiple media outlets cited Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek has completed a new round of financing, raising approximately 1 trillion yuan, with CATL and Tencent as the major contributors in this round. This sets the new record for the largest financing in China's AI industry.

It is revealed that the initial fundraising target of this round was 500 billion yuan. Due to extremely high subscription enthusiasm, the target was later raised to 800 billion yuan, and finally finalized at 1 trillion yuan.

The market has long anticipated this 100-billion-yuan level financing.

Several months ago, DeepSeek secured its first external financing (Series A). Tianyancha data shows that DeepSeek did not launch its first external financing until April 2026, and completed the delivery in June, raising about 510 billion yuan with an enterprise valuation of 3.4 trillion yuan.

Illustration: Hurun Global Unicorn Index 2026

In the Series A investor list, Liang Wenfeng personally contributed 200 billion yuan, making him the largest single contributor; Tencent contributed 100 billion yuan, the CATL ecosystem contributed 50 billion yuan, and NetEase, JD.com and IDG each contributed around 30 billion yuan.

At that time, news had spread that the intended investment funds had exceeded 1 trillion yuan, but Liang Wenfeng only selected and accepted 510 billion yuan from high-quality investors.

In other words, nearly 500 billion yuan of intended investment funds are still waiting to enter the market. This has kept the news of the second round of financing fermenting ever since the Series A round was closed.

There is another noteworthy detail in the first round of financing: except for the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, external investors need to hold shares through a limited partnership structure, have no voting rights, and face a five-year lock-up period. Liang Wenfeng still holds nearly 100% of the voting rights.

It can be inferred that after raising 1 trillion yuan in the second round, the company's control will most likely remain firmly in the hands of the founder. What do the investors want then? The answer may not be complicated.

01. Tencent and CATL are the major investors again

Take Tencent and CATL, which participated in both rounds of financing, as examples. What Tencent wants is the priority to access the ecological entrance. The 100 billion yuan it invested in Series A is a front-row ticket, which guarantees that it will have priority cooperation space when DeepSeek's model capabilities are subsequently connected to scenarios such as WeChat, games and cloud services.

What CATL wants is the coordination of energy infrastructure, including energy storage peak-valley arbitrage, direct supply of green power, and supporting energy consumption indicators. Its core goal is to incorporate the largest cost of data centers — electricity bills — into its own business territory.

One controls the traffic entrance, the other controls power. Both of them bet on DeepSeek for its positioning value as a computing power base.

Thus it is not difficult to see that industrial capital are scrambling to enter the market not only for financial investment in the large model track, but also for not wanting to miss the opportunity to bind top domestic traffic platforms and hard-core new energy infrastructure.

Of course, business synergy and positioning are only one of the factors. More importantly, DeepSeek has shown the market the possibility of commercialization.

According to QuestMobile data, the number of active users of DeepSeek in September 2026 reached 123 million, second only to Doubao and Qianwen. However, its C-end App still maintains a free, ad-free and subscription-free model, and the huge user traffic has not yet been directly monetized.

Image source: Quest Mobile

Its real revenue engine is at the B-end: API calls are the main source of revenue. In the first seven months of 2026, its recognized revenue was about 475 million yuan, ten times that of the whole year of 2025. By September, its annualized revenue had exceeded 1 billion US dollars.

A key change is reflected in the pricing strategy. In the past two years, DeepSeek has been labeled as a "price butcher"; in August this year, it raised its API prices by 2.3 to 4.5 times. After the price adjustment, customer retention remained stable without obvious churn.

A few days before the news of this round of financing was exposed, it also officially announced that the network search and crawling API will be charged per request starting from November 1, with a price of 5 yuan per 1000 successful requests.

The signal released by the product side is very clear: the C-end will continue to follow the inclusive route, while all B-end capabilities will gradually move towards profitability accounting.

At the same time, DeepSeek has begun to increase expenditure on AI data center construction, and continue to develop open-source models for the Chinese and overseas markets.

02. Will it become the largest IPO financing in Chinese history?

On the same day of October 22, reports from Financial Associated Press said that Anthropic will submit its S-1 prospectus as soon as this Friday. The market expects its IPO valuation to be 1.8 to 2 trillion US dollars, with maximum fundraising up to 100 billion US dollars, which is expected to rank among the largest IPOs in history.

At this stage, it is still burning money. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's revenue was 16.3 billion US dollars, with a net loss of 80.7 billion US dollars, of which 72 billion US dollars was the accounting cost of convertible notes; it may need to invest another 750 billion US dollars in computing power procurement in the future.

However, the adjusted indicators have rebounded: the gross profit margin of reasoning in the second quarter rose to 70% - 85%, and operating profit turned positive, but it is still far from achieving stable free cash flow.

A suspense follows: if referring to Anthropic, can DeepSeek set a new record for the largest IPO financing in Chinese history?

According to comprehensive reports, DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare for its IPO on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. Yan Wentao, former partner of GL Ventures, joined the company as CFO in late September this year, with plans to submit the application as soon as the end of 2026.

Meanwhile, market calculation data shows that DeepSeek's market capitalization after listing may range from 1.5 trillion to 2.5 trillion yuan.

At the close of trading on October 22, the "king of stocks" in the A-share market was Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, with a share price of 8.59 yuan and a market value of about 3.06 trillion yuan.

After the completion of this round of financing, DeepSeek's valuation will reach 500 billion yuan, 2.1 times the sum of the market value of Zhipu and MiniMax.

DeepSeek's sprint for the largest IPO financing scale in Chinese history still leaves room for imagination. However, another question is: how can the market absorb such a huge fundraising scale?

Therefore, is it possible for DeepSeek to follow the path of Zhipu and MiniMax in its listing fundraising process?

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This article is from the WeChat official account "Yuan Media Hui", written by Xie Chunsheng, and authorized for release by 36Kr.