DeepSeek

Overview

DeepSeek was founded on 17 July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who is also CEO. It is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China and is owned by the hedge fund High-Flyer (as of May 2024 Liang held about 84% through shell companies, per Wikipedia). Its R1 reasoning model was released in January 2025 (see Timeline).

Products

• DeepSeek family - open-weight language models; see also DeepSeek V3.2
• DeepSeek chatbot app and API
• Coding: deepseek-coder

Timeline (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-05)

• 2024-11-20: R1-Lite-Preview (API only). 2024-12: V3.
• 2025-01-20: R1 released under the MIT licence. 2025-05-28: R1-0528.
• 2025-08-21: V3.1; 2025-09-22: V3.1-Terminus; 2025-12-01: V3.2 (plus V3.2-Speciale).
• 2026-04-24: V4-Flash and V4-Pro previews. 2026-07-31: V4-Flash official; 2026-08-13: V4-Pro official; 2026-09-10: V4.1-Flash.

Ownership and funding

• Owner: High-Flyer.
• May 2026: Series A of USD 7B at a USD 52B post-money valuation (Wikipedia; single source).
• July 2026: reported IPO discussions targeting 2027 and a higher valuation; these are reports, not confirmed.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek (secondary; fetched 2026-10-05)
• https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai (accessed 2026-09-30)

Open items

• Funding round and IPO talk rest on Wikipedia alone; no primary source (DeepSeek does not publish financials).