DeepSeek Nears a $15 Billion Raise Days After a U.S. Federal Removal Order
DeepSeek is wrapping up a fundraising round worth about $15 billion, or roughly 100 billion yuan, according to Reuters, which reported on October 22, 2026 that the Chinese AI startup was nearing the close of the round. Bloomberg News first reported the raise, citing sources. TechCrunch reported that the round came two days after the U.S. ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's AI technology from their systems over security concerns. Potential investors include CATL and Tencent, among others.
The round follows a sequence of reported financing steps over the past five months. In May, China's newly founded national AI fund was leading investment talks for DeepSeek's fundraising. In June, DeepSeek raised more than $7 billion at a $50 billion valuation, meaning the price investors placed on the whole company. In July, the company was reportedly seeking an additional $1.5 billion at a valuation of around $71 billion. In early October, CNBC reported that DeepSeek was considering expanding its latest round to as much as 100 billion yuan, twice its earlier target. The same day, Reuters reported that the company was set to raise more than 80 billion yuan, or $11.93 billion. The 100 billion yuan figure now matches the size of the round reported on October 22.
DeepSeek was also reported in July to be planning a potential IPO, or initial public offering, in China as early as next year. That plan has not been completed, and the current round is described as a private funding round, meaning shares are sold to selected investors rather than the public.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who retains an estimated 81.6% stake in the company's Chinese operating entity following its earlier funding round. The copyright holder named on DeepSeek's website is Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd.
On the product side, DeepSeek has updated DeepSeek V4.1 Flash to version V4.1-Flash-1017. The company describes the update as delivering significantly improved project development capabilities at lower cost and faster speed. DeepSeek has also added API (application programming interface, the standard way one program sends requests to another) support for web search and for web scraping and fetching, the automated collection of content from web pages. The company's website lists DeepSeek V4.1, V4, V3.2, V3.1, R1 and V3 among its research models.
The broader context here is the contrast between two signals arriving in the same week. A federal civilian removal order targets the use of DeepSeek models inside U.S. government systems, while private capital in China is being raised at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine for a lab founded only in 2023. For enterprise architects, the practical question is less about valuation than about procurement. Agencies and vendors that have built DeepSeek models into their pipelines will need to assess what the removal order requires of them, and whether the new API features change how those integrations are built.
In my view, the most useful thing to watch is whether the added web search and fetching capabilities, combined with the cost and speed claims for V4.1-Flash-1017, translate into adoption among developers outside the government channel. The funding will determine how much compute DeepSeek can secure, and the product updates indicate where it intends to put that compute: agentic workloads that touch live web data, delivered through an API that developers can call directly.
