DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Hits $36B, Tops AI Founder Wealth

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng saw his net worth double to $36 billion after a new fundraising round, according to people familiar with the matter. That figure puts him ahead of other AI model creators, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Greg Brockman.

The round, whose size was not disclosed, values the Chinese AI lab at roughly $100 billion. Liang owns a majority stake in the company, which has drawn attention for its low-cost, high-performance models.

The fundraising comes as DeepSeek competes with U.S.-based labs on both model capability and pricing. Its flagship DeepSeek-V3 has matched or topped benchmarks set by GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 in several tests.

Liang, a former hedge fund trader, founded DeepSeek in 2021. The fresh capital gives the firm more runway to scale its compute infrastructure and expand into enterprise clients.