DeepSeek funding hits $15B two days after the US federal ban

Felix Laurent 22 Oct 2026 2 min read

funding

DeepSeek funding has reached about $15 billion in a single round. The Hangzhou lab raised roughly 100 billion yuan, Bloomberg reported on October 22. Reuters, citing two people close to the deal, put it at about $14.98 billion. The round should close in the coming days, and terms could still change.

The timing is what makes it news. Two days earlier, the US Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek from their systems.

Who is backing DeepSeek

Battery maker CATL and WeChat owner Tencent are among the largest investors, according to both reports. The full investor list has not been disclosed, and neither has the valuation.

Demand pushed the round far past its plan. DeepSeek started with a target of 50 billion yuan. It lifted the goal to 80 billion yuan, then to about 100 billion. Reuters notes that many of the backers are tied to the state or to large corporations.

DeepSeek funding timeline and valuation

This is the lab’s third reported raise in five months. The table lists each step as it was reported at the time.

Date	What was reported	valuation
May 2026	First talks, with China’s Big Fund and Tencent	About $45B
June 2026	More than $7.4B closed (50B yuan)	Over $50B
July 2026	Talks for another $1.5B	About $71B
October 2026	About $15B (100B yuan), CATL and Tencent	Not disclosed

The October round is twice the size of the June one. No report has confirmed its valuation yet.

The US federal ban on DeepSeek

The DHS order was published in the Federal Register on October 20. It rests on the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018. Civilian agencies must remove DeepSeek products and stop buying new ones. The order also covers third-party tools built on DeepSeek models.

The ban stops at federal civilian systems. It does not reach private companies, state governments or individual users. So far it has not slowed the money coming in at home.

What the money is for

DeepSeek has been spending more on data centers and open-weight models, Bloomberg reported. The gap with US labs is still wide: OpenAI and Anthropic have each raised more than $100 billion.

The lab keeps shipping as well. Last month it released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a model built for faster inference and higher throughput.

DeepSeek IPO plans

A public listing looks like the next step. In July, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek was aiming for a listing in mainland China in 2027. In September, Reuters reported that it hired CITIC Securities to prepare a possible IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market.

Who controls DeepSeek

Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023. He previously co-founded the quant hedge fund High-Flyer, which paid for the lab’s early work. DeepSeek went global in early 2025 with R1, a free open-weight reasoning model that rivaled US systems at a fraction of the cost.

Liang still owns most of the company. WireScreen puts his look-through stake in the Chinese operating entity at 81.6% as of August 2026. The June round was structured to leave voting control with him.

What it means

Chinese AI labs are not short of capital, even under US pressure. DeepSeek now holds more cash than most rivals at home. It still has a fraction of what OpenAI or Anthropic can spend.