DeepSeek has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that it is suspending the deal for now, people familiar with the matter said, days after comments widely attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about US-Chinese AI competition went viral.
The Chinese AI pioneer verbally informed some of its would-be backers that they would not be signing investment agreements in the coming days, as they had expected. DeepSeek might choose to resume the deal process at a later date. The suspension stemmed in part from Liang’s frustration over online reports about his comments to investors during his first financing deal, which closed in June and raised $7 billion.
Bloomberg has not verified the authenticity of those posts, which concerned a transcript of a meeting Liang held with unidentified parties. Chinese media including Yicai reported that the founder talked about reliance on Nvidia chips and China’s lag relative to the US. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to comment requests.
Talks kicked off weeks after the first round with backers including Tencent and CATL. DeepSeek was aiming to raise at least 10 billion yuan; targeting a pre-money valuation of at least 480 billion yuan (~$71B). The company has begun IPO preparations and may file as soon as this year. Liang pledged to keep developing open-source AI models while pursuing AGI.