Liang Wenfeng is dissatisfied with the leak of the 4-hour internal speech, and DeepSeek announced the suspension of the second round of financing
According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek announced the suspension of its second round of financing and verbally notified some potential investors that it would not sign investment agreements as expected. This suspension partly stems from founder Liang Wenfeng's dissatisfaction with the leak of a 4-hour internal transcript during its first financing deal, where he made 52 statements in an investor meeting regarding DeepSeek's organizational culture, open-source logic, technology roadmap, and views on the competitive landscape of the industry. The nearly 4-hour meeting record recently went viral on social media, including statements such as "The biggest gap between China and the U.S. in AI is computing power resources." Both DeepSeek and Liang Wenfeng have not confirmed the authenticity of the leaked record.DeepSeek stated that it may still choose to resume the transaction process in the future and has begun preparations for an initial public offering, with the IPO potentially being filed as early as this year.DeepSeek completed its first round of external financing in June 2026, raising over 50 billion yuan, approximately 7.4 billion dollars, with a post-investment valuation of about 50-59 billion dollars. It adopted a special structure, with most funds entering a limited partnership managed by Liang Wenfeng, where investors have no voting rights and are locked in for 5 years. Liang Wenfeng himself contributed about 20 billion yuan as the largest contributor, with participation from Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase, and the Chinese National AI Fund. DeepSeek subsequently initiated discussions for its second round of financing in mid-July, targeting a valuation of about 71 billion dollars.
