DeepSeek suspended its second funding round, days after comments attributed to its founder spread online

The money is on hold. DeepSeek has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that the deal is suspended for now, first reported by Haze Fan and Pei Li at Bloomberg on Saturday, and the company verbally informed some would-be backers that the investment agreements they had expected to sign in the coming days would not be signed. It may restart the process later. The reporters attributed the account to people familiar with the private discussions who asked not to be named.

Bloomberg reported that the suspension stemmed in part from the frustration of founder Liang Wenfeng over online reports of comments he made to investors during the company's first financing round, which closed in June and raised $7bn for the lab. The posts are unverified. Bloomberg said the material concerned a transcript of a meeting Liang held with unidentified parties, and that it had not established whether the posts were authentic. Chinese outlets including Yicai reported this week that Liang discussed a reliance on Nvidia chips and a persistent Chinese lag behind the United States in the sophistication of its AI work.

The second round was to raise at least 10bn yuan on a pre-money valuation of at least 480bn yuan, figures Bloomberg reported before the suspension, against a company that carried a price tag of roughly $50bn when it raised for the first time. Tencent, Contemporary Amperex Technology and the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund all backed that first deal. Bloomberg also reported that DeepSeek has begun preparing an initial public offering and may file as soon as this year. DeepSeek was founded in 2023. It is owned by the hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Bloomberg.

No public document records any of this. DeepSeek is private, the round was private, and no filing, prospectus or company statement exists to check the reporting against. This brief rests on Bloomberg's account and on nothing else, which is stated here rather than implied.