Hillhouse partner Yan Wentao reportedly set to join DeepSeek as CFO amid IPO push
智东西 · wechat · 2026-09-14
According to reports, Yan Wentao, a post-90s partner at Hillhouse Capital who invested in ByteDance, Xiaohongshu and MiniMax, has started his exit process at Hillhouse and is expected to become DeepSeek's CFO — the company's first heavyweight non-technical executive hire.
Reuters previously reported DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare a STAR Market IPO this year. In June, DeepSeek raised $7.4B at a $50B+ post-money valuation, with founder Liang Wenfeng personally investing 20B yuan and Tencent and CATL putting in 10B and 5B yuan; a July round reportedly values it at 500B yuan. On the product side, DeepSeek released the 552B-parameter MoE model V4.1 Flash on Sept 10. The CFO hire and IPO prep signal accelerating capitalization.
Related event: DeepSeek Poises to Hire Hillhouse Partner Yan Wentao as First CFO(3 posts)→
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