Analysis
DeepSeek is set to raise more than 80 billion yuan — roughly $12 billion, reported precisely as $11.93 billion — in a second external funding round, Reuters reported, with the final tally potentially reaching 100 billion yuan, a ceiling Bloomberg first reported, as the Chinese AI lab builds a war chest ahead of a planned listing on Shanghai's STAR Market. Battery giant CATL and Tencent Holdings are among the largest commitments.
A War Chest, Not A Rescue
- CATL — China's dominant battery maker, among the largest new commitments, a sign DeepSeek is pulling capital from outside traditional tech VC.
- Tencent Holdings — an existing and reportedly expanding backer, tying DeepSeek to China's largest consumer internet platform.
“- Tencent Holdings — an existing and reportedly expanding backer, tying DeepSeek to China's largest consumer internet platform.”
The raise is a sequel, not a debut. DeepSeek closed its first external funding round at roughly $7.4 billion just one month before kicking off this second round in July, when Pulse covered the lab crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue ahead of its Shanghai listing plans.
This round already exceeds DeepSeek's original 50 billion yuan target, according to a second report, and is being marketed at a 500 billion yuan valuation — about $74 billion, or roughly 10x the implied value of its June round.
DeepSeek's path mirrors, in reverse order, the one taken by US labs: OpenAI and Anthropic built valuation first and are only now filing for IPOs after years of private mega-rounds, while DeepSeek is stacking a second enormous private round directly ahead of a domestic listing, with CITIC Securities already hired to advise. The company has also been shoring up its hardware independence, partnering with Huawei to build programming tools for Ascend AI chips — a hedge against the export-control risk Pulse flagged — while shipping its DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model to keep pace with rivals like Moonshot AI and Mistral AI, both of which also closed Q3 2026 rounds above $3 billion.
The deal is not closed. Reuters' reporting hedges the figures as "set to raise" and sourced to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly, and DeepSeek has not confirmed the number itself — a caveat that matters given how often Chinese pre-IPO funding targets get revised between announcement and close. A 500 billion yuan ask also assumes international and onshore investors value DeepSeek's open-weight model strategy the way they've valued Western closed-model labs, which isn't guaranteed: DeepSeek monetizes differently, leaning on API and enterprise licensing rather than consumer subscriptions.
What to watch: whether the round actually closes in October as Reuters' sourcing suggests, and whether the final number lands closer to 80 billion or the full 100 billion yuan ceiling — the spread between those two is nearly $3 billion and will be read as a signal of investor demand either way.
