Comment by nmfisher
3 days ago
Until recently, DeepSeek were self-financed (it was a spin-out from a hedge fund). They just raised ~50million RMB (US$7bn), and according to media [0] (which admittedly can be unreliable), the lead investors were:
1) The CEO himself 2) Tencent 3) CALT (the battery company) 4) NetEase (internet/media company) 5) JD.com (ecommerce) 6) Chinese investment firms
What are they expecting in return? I'd say the same thing that all those investors in OpenAI and Anthropic are expecting - profit.
[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/vcpe/2026-06-11/doc-iniazi...
My understanding of Deepseeks raise is that it's basically do that they can give equity grants, as they were losing lots of people to competitors.
If they’re expecting profits like the VC backed US companies how come they behave so differently?
The investment round only closed in the last few weeks, it would have had zero influence on anything up to & including DeepSeek V4.
Whether that now changes, who knows. It appears the CEO will remain the largest investor/shareholder, though, so I'm hoping not much changes.