Yan Wentao has officially joined DeepSeek.

Investment Community, dispatched from Hangzhou:

On Monday (September 21), Yan Wentao officially joined DeepSeek and has reported for duty at the company in person.

Last week, the news that Yan Wentao, Partner of GL Ventures, would serve as CFO of DeepSeek spread quickly, and Investment Community reported that Liang Wenfeng had recruited a CFO. In fact, in the past two months, many young partners from top VCs have also participated in the competition for the CFO position at DeepSeek.

The arrival of this post-90s former partner of GL Ventures now puts an end to the three-year vacancy of the CFO position since DeepSeek was founded.

At this moment, it is approaching the conclusion of DeepSeek's Series B financing. Over the past two weeks, the DeepSeek team has been screening LPs and rejected many capital parties — this is a stricter financing selection than ever before.

Everyone is watching what heights this group of young Chinese people will lead DeepSeek to reach.

Liang Wenfeng's CFO is in place

Fudan Alumni, the Post-90s Partner from GL Ventures

DeepSeek has always favored talented young people.

This time it is Yan Wentao. As early as 2025, Yan Wentao, as a new generation representative of GL Ventures, was selected into the "F40 China Young Investors" list by Investment Community. From this, we learned his resume:

Born in 1991, he graduated from Fudan University. He worked at Tencent Investment and H Capital successively from 2013 to 2020, joined GL Ventures in 2020, and quickly became a representative of post-90s investors.

In fact, there is more vivid experience about this young CFO.

At Fudan University, Yan Wentao studied in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering. In his school days, he started a campus startup to build a campus discount platform, whose main businesses included mobile newsletters, a website and physical discount cards. At its peak, the team had 50 members, signed contracts with more than 100 merchants, covered 14 universities in Shanghai, achieved a monthly profit of over 10,000 yuan, and even obtained financing.

Later, at the age of 19, Yan Wentao went to two strategic consulting firms, BCG and Roland Berger, as the youngest intern in China's consulting industry. At the same time, he worked as an exchange student between Fudan University and Stanford University, interning at the strategy headquarters of a high-tech company in Silicon Valley. Slightly unexpectedly, he also worked as an intern reporter in the technology section of a certain media, focusing on business competition and technology entrepreneurs.

We learned that many classmates and colleagues who have interacted with Yan Wentao speak highly of him.

Yan Wentao once said that he began to research large models in 2020, and turned his attention to embodied intelligence in 2023. Looking back at his past investment cases, Yan Wentao participated in investment projects of a number of cutting-edge technology enterprises including MiniMax, Zhipu AI, ByteDance, J&T Express, and Webull.

Now, he will start a new journey at DeepSeek. This choice has also brought shock and inspiration to many young practitioners in the primary market.

Countdown to Series B Financing

The intensive capital moves of DeepSeek this year have become a prominent scene in the venture capital circle. Whether one can participate in its financing has even become a weather vane for the outside world to judge the strength of an investment institution.

It is recalled that in June, DeepSeek completed its first round of financing of about 500 billion yuan, with many investors taking seats at the table first, and the post-money valuation exceeded 3.5 trillion yuan, among which Liang Wenfeng personally contributed about 200 billion yuan;

Subsequently, the news of the second round of financing came out in July, with the pre-money valuation rising to 5 trillion yuan, and new investors mainly consisting of industrial investment institutions such as Stony Creek Capital and SMIC PE will be introduced.

More details have been leaked. According to The Information, DeepSeek recently held an investor meeting with high confidentiality requirements — participants need to go to DeepSeek's Beijing or Hangzhou office, while Liang Wenfeng joined the meeting online.

All signs indicate that the landing of the Series B financing may be just around the corner.

A number of people close to the transaction told us that in the past two weeks, DeepSeek has conducted a qualification review on the LP list, and many LPs with state-owned assets, non-listed company, or natural person background have been rejected in this round of review. "Now everyone is waiting for the result of the qualification review."

DeepSeek has always had strict screening for LP identities, which was already reflected in the first round of financing, aiming to avoid the final flow of equity to unknown entities or cause other potential risks.

At present, DeepSeek has planned for listing and started preparing for the STAR Market IPO. Although the process is still in its early stage, the market has already valued this leading player who once led the wave of open source large models in China at over one trillion yuan.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), the author is Feng Yuchen, and it is released with authorization from 36Kr.