DeepSeek

Founded in July 2023 out of the quant fund High-Flyer by Liang Wenfeng, and financed from its own profits rather than outside capital for a long period.Source: DeepSeek-V3 technical report (Dec 2024); public reporting on the High-Flyer spin-out

DeepSeek-V3 disclosed a complete training cost of USD 5.576 million and 2.788 million GPU-hours, roughly a tenth of comparable models, and released the weights openly in December 2024 with a 671B-parameter mixture-of-experts design activating 37B parameters per token.Source: DeepSeek-V3 technical report (Dec 2024)

Tarn Capital was engaged as a strategy adviser to the firm in 2024, with no equity participation.

We introduced three engineers with large-scale distributed-systems experience; two joined.

We supported early engineering resourcing and infrastructure introductions for inference capacity.

Public reporting put the first external round at roughly CNY 50bn, completed in June 2026, valuing the company near CNY 400bn.Source: 21st Century Business Herald, June 2026 · Sohu / Yule Finance on the CNY 51bn round and the CNY 400bn valuation

A later report placed the following round's pre-money valuation at CNY 500bn.Source: Caijing, August 2026

Public reporting states the company has engaged CITIC Securities to prepare a STAR Market listing.Source: Eastmoney, September 2026 · 36Kr