DeepSeek hits $1B annualized revenue, raises another $7B at ~$70B valuation
智东西 · wechat · 2026-09-24
DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors the company's annualized revenue run-rate has reached $1 billion, more than doubling from under $500 million months earlier, The Information reports.
- Funding & IPO: DeepSeek is finalizing a RMB 50 billion ($7B) round by end of October at a RMB 500 billion ($70B) valuation, while preparing a Shanghai STAR Market IPO. Its June round raised RMB 50B at RMB 400B valuation, with Tencent (RMB 10B) and CATL (RMB 5B) as largest outside investors; Liang personally put in RMB 20B.
- Pricing: Peak-hour price hikes raised customer costs 2.3–4.5x, yet customer count hasn't dropped; the lightweight V4.1-Flash model meanwhile cut prices 60%.
- Financials: Revenue comes almost entirely from API calls. First 7 months of this year: RMB 475M revenue (10x all of 2025) with RMB 715M net loss; API gross margin of 82.9% exceeds Anthropic's and OpenAI's.
- Compute strategy: Over 70% of compute goes to training, as revenue growth is not the priority. DeepSeek is testing smaller models on gaming GPUs for inference and pushing domestic chips for training—Huawei may deliver training chips as soon as Q4.
Related event: DeepSeek Hits $1B ARR, Targets $70B Valuation in New Funding Round(11 posts)→
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