DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research company founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and spun out of his quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, which still owns and funds it. Based in Hangzhou, it develops open-weight models including the DeepSeek-V3 base model and the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, which drew global attention for matching frontier systems at far lower reported training cost. For its first two years the company turned down outside venture capital and was financed through High-Flyer; reports in 2026 indicated it was in talks for a first external funding round, but that round had not closed as of June 2026.