MoneyThe story, in brief
DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round
$45B. DeepSeek's first-ever funding round could value the Chinese AI lab higher than Anthropic's Series A.
The KeyNews take
Why it matters
DeepSeek's emergence as a compute-efficient alternative to U.S. giants is reshaping investor appetite and valuation benchmarks. A $45B first round signals that capability-per-dollar, not just raw model performance, is now the market's valuation driver.
The key facts
5 to knowDeepSeek seeking $45B valuation on first investment round
Achieved prominence in early 2025 with efficient LLM training
Trained on fraction of compute power vs. OpenAI/Anthropic models
Demonstrated cost advantage in model development
Chinese AI lab entering competitive funding landscape
Go to the source
TechCrunch Startupstechcrunch.com
Publisher excerpt: The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic.