DeepSeek reportedly set to raise more than ¥80B (~$12B) at a ~$74B valuation, with Tencent and CATL leading

The round, reported by a person familiar with the matter, would be the first external financing for the Hangzhou lab, which has been funded by founder Liang Wenfeng's quant fund High-Flyer since launch. Tencent and battery maker CATL are set to lead, with other backers joining, and the money is described as a pre-IPO round ahead of a possible listing. At roughly $74B, DeepSeek would be valued above Moonshot AI, which this week reportedly closed a round at $50B, and well below the $1.4T figure OpenAI is said to be targeting. Bloomberg Intelligence put the US-China frontier gap at about 3% after DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and the lab's open-weight releases remain the reference point that Reflection's Beam and Mistral's Large 4 were both positioned against this week. For founders building on open models, a capitalised DeepSeek means the free-weights pipeline that undercuts API pricing is likely to continue, and the Tencent and CATL names signal distribution and industrial deployment rather than a pure research bet.